NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q 6 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

2262 points

3514 points

55% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

75 FPS

28 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

52 FPS

17 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

56 FPS

25 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

37 FPS

9 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

5621 points

54% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

1382.74 points

376% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

25908 points

67657 points

161% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

61701 points

111% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

51683 points

51% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

64897 points

121% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

59548 points

84% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

7% slightly higher core clock speed

975 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1185 MHz

0.59% slightly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

6 GiB

49% significantly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

256 Bit

33% slightly larger memory bus width

192 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

264 GB/s

17% slightly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

65 W

123% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

15% slightly higher pixel rate

56.88 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

142.2 Gigatexels/s

16% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

4.55 TFLOPS

16% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

1920

15% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

120

15% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

16% slightly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

193rd of 586

138th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2020 January

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

GDDR6

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

4.6

GeForce GTX 970 vs GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q specs and performance

For gaming, the GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 970 in our tests.

The GeForce GTX 970 has a slightly higher core clock speed. This is the frequency at which the graphics core is running at. While not necessarily an indicator of overall performance, this metric can be useful when comparing two GPUs based on the same architecture. Despite this, the GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q 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 RTX 2060 Max-Q has significantly more memory with 6 GiB of memory compared to 4 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q has a significantly lower TDP at 65 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 970 at 145 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q is faster than the GeForce GTX 970.