NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 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

22 %

51 %

131% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

45 FPS

123 FPS

78 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

34 FPS

60 FPS

26 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

86 FPS

55 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

47 FPS

19 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3642

8714

139% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

308.84

2445.24

691% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

25908

99213

282% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153

96416

230% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107

74845

119% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

24099

89470

271% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

31442

84353

168% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

1320 MHz

25% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1777 MHz

50% significantly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

12 GiB

200% 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

360 GB/s

60% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

17% slightly lower TDP

170 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

85.3 Gigapixels/s

29% slightly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

199 Gigatexels/s

62% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

12.74 TFLOPS

224% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

3584

115% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

112

7% 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

109th of 549

41st of 549

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

September 2014

January 2021

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 3060 specs and performance

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the GeForce RTX 3060 GPU is faster than the GeForce GTX 970 in gaming.

In our comparison, the GeForce RTX 3060 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. In addition, the GeForce RTX 3060 also has a significantly higher boost clock speed. This is a frequency that can be reached if the GPU is cooled sufficiently and has enough power.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the GeForce RTX 3060 has significantly more memory with 12 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 GTX 970 has a slightly lower TDP at 145 W when compared to the GeForce RTX 3060 at 170 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

In conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the GeForce RTX 3060 over the GeForce GTX 970.