NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop 6 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Specifications
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GPU Comparison

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

4534 points

100% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

112 FPS

65 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

57 FPS

22 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

78 FPS

47 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

44 FPS

16 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

2352.59 points

711% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

25908 points

98709 points

280% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

92420 points

217% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

71210 points

108% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

84300 points

187% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

82804 points

155% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

16% slightly higher core clock speed

900 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1703 MHz

44% significantly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

5.97 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

336 GB/s

49% 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

68.4 Gigapixels/s

3% slightly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

171 Gigatexels/s

39% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

10.94 TFLOPS

179% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

3840

130% significantly 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

111th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2021 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 3060 Laptop benchmarks

For gaming, the GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 970 in our tests.

In our comparison, 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 3060 Laptop has a significantly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop has significantly more memory with 5.97 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 terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop is better than the GeForce GTX 970.