NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Specifications
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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

22 %

65 %

195% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

45 FPS

159 FPS

113 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

34 FPS

79 FPS

45 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

115 FPS

84 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

62 FPS

34 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3642

11624

219% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

308.84

3064.92

892% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

25908

128321

395% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153

120183

312% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107

95490

179% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

24099

111817

363% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

31442

104700

232% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

1410 MHz

34% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1665 MHz

41% 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

448 GB/s

99% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

37% slightly lower TDP

200 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

133.2 Gigapixels/s

101% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

253.1 Gigatexels/s

106% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

16.20 TFLOPS

313% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

4864

192% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

152

46% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

42% much more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

109th of 549

27th of 549

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

September 2014

December 2020

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 Ti comparison

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

The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 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 Ti also 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 3060 Ti 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 GTX 970 has a slightly lower TDP at 145 W when compared to the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti at 200 W. This is not a measure of performance, but rather the amount of heat generated by the chip when running at its highest speed.

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

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