NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 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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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 369.00

$ 190.30 significantly less expensive

$ 559.30

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

8113 points

258% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

197 FPS

150 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

96 FPS

62 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

140 FPS

109 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

77 FPS

49 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

13651 points

274% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

3380.77 points

1066% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

25908 points

149734 points

477% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

135064 points

363% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

99979 points

193% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

128209 points

337% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

121057 points

274% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

1500 MHz

42% much higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1725 MHz

46% significantly 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

51% significantly lower TDP

220 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

165.6 Gigapixels/s

151% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

317.4 Gigatexels/s

159% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

20.31 TFLOPS

418% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

5888

253% 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

71% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

193rd of 586

53rd of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2020 September

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 3070 specs and performance

For gaming, the GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 970 in our tests.

Our database shows that the GeForce RTX 3070 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 RTX 3070 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.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the GeForce RTX 3070 has significantly more memory with 8 GiB of memory compared to 4 GiB. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 970 has a significantly lower TDP at 145 W when compared to the GeForce RTX 3070 at 220 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 3070 is better than the GeForce GTX 970.