NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q 8 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

5387 points

138% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

124 FPS

77 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

70 FPS

36 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

84 FPS

53 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

56 FPS

28 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

8047 points

120% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

1574.05 points

442% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

25908 points

104025 points

301% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

87150 points

198% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

65188 points

91% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

90092 points

207% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

82332 points

154% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

42% much higher core clock speed

735 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

7% slightly higher boost clock speed

1095 MHz

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

90 W

61% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

70.08 Gigapixels/s

6% slightly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

201.5 Gigatexels/s

64% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

6.45 TFLOPS

64% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

2944

76% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

184

76% significantly 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

94th 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 2080 Max-Q comparison

For gaming, the GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 970 in our tests.

The GeForce GTX 970 has a much 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 970 also has a slightly higher boost clock speed. This is a frequency that can be reached if the GPU is cooled sufficiently and has enough power.

As stated by the manufacturer, the GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q has significantly more memory with 8 GiB of memory compared to 4 GiB. If you're planning at playing games at high resolutions with high-quality textures, you will need a lot of memory.

In addition, the GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q has a significantly lower TDP at 90 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 970 at 145 W. This is not a measure of performance, but rather the amount of heat generated by the chip when running at its highest speed.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q is faster than the GeForce GTX 970.