NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M 3 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

593 points

1446 points

143% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

Volumetric ray casting test, a computationally expensive method of rendering high-quality scenes

13 FPS

30 FPS

17 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

11 FPS

22 FPS

12 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

10 FPS

19 FPS

10 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

9 FPS

18 FPS

9 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

1232 points

2280 points

85% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

139.59 points

206.38 points

47% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

11818 points

18285 points

54% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

12257 points

20012 points

63% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

10582 points

21753 points

105% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

11578 points

19440 points

67% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

9535 points

19602 points

105% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1097 MHz

18% slightly higher core clock speed

924 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1176 MHz

13% slightly higher boost clock speed

1038 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

33% slightly more memory

3 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

128 Bit

192 Bit

49% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

80.19 GB/s

120.3 GB/s

50% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

65 W

15% slightly lower TDP

75 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

18.82 Gigapixels/s

49.82 Gigapixels/s

164% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

47.04 Gigatexels/s

83.04 Gigatexels/s

76% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

1.50 TFLOPS

2.66 TFLOPS

76% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

640

1280

100% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

100% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

200% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

309th of 586

238th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2015 March

2014 October

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

GeForce GTX 960M vs GeForce GTX 970M specs and performance

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the GeForce GTX 970M GPU is faster than the GeForce GTX 960M in gaming.

Our database shows that the GeForce GTX 960M has a slightly higher core clock speed. The core clock speed (or base speed) is the frequency at which the GPU core runs. This metric makes sense when comparing GPUs of a similar architecture or generation. In addition, the GeForce GTX 960M also has a slightly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the GeForce GTX 960M has slightly more memory with 4 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 960M has a slightly lower TDP at 65 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 970M at 75 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

In conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the GeForce GTX 970M over the GeForce GTX 960M.