NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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GPU Comparison

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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

3523 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

76 FPS

29 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

55 FPS

20 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

55 FPS

24 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

41 FPS

13 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

6954 points

90% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

1824.37 points

529% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

25908 points

86778 points

234% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

74397 points

155% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

62864 points

84% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

76635 points

161% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

72004 points

122% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

18% slightly higher core clock speed

885 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

8 GiB

100% significantly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

256 Bit

Identical

256 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

384 GB/s

71% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

80 W

81% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

75.84 Gigapixels/s

14% slightly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

170.6 Gigatexels/s

39% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

5.46 TFLOPS

39% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

2304

38% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

144

38% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

14% slightly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

193rd of 586

137th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2019 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 2070 Max-Q specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q beats the GeForce GTX 970 in gaming performance.

In our comparison, the GeForce GTX 970 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. Despite this, the GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q has a slightly higher boost clock speed. The boost clock speed is the frequency that the GPU core can reach if the temperature is low enough. The allows for higher performance in certain scenarios.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q has significantly more memory with 8 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 2070 Max-Q has a significantly lower TDP at 80 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 970 at 145 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

In terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the GeForce RTX 2070 Max-Q is better than the GeForce GTX 970.