NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 369.00

$ 1180.99 significantly less expensive

$ 1549.99

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

13991 points

518% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

333 FPS

286 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

169 FPS

134 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

241 FPS

209 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

134 FPS

106 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

19931 points

446% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

5820.93 points

1907% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

25908 points

238123 points

819% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

204921 points

602% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

138859 points

307% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

194465 points

564% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

179816 points

455% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

1400 MHz

33% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1695 MHz

43% significantly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

24 GiB

499% significantly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

256 Bit

384 Bit

49% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

936.2 GB/s

317% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

141% significantly lower TDP

350 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

189.8 Gigapixels/s

187% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

556 Gigatexels/s

353% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

35.58 TFLOPS

807% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

10496

530% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

328

215% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

112

100% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

193rd of 586

25th 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

GDDR6X

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 3090 specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the GeForce RTX 3090 beats the GeForce GTX 970 in gaming performance.

Our database shows that the GeForce RTX 3090 has a slightly 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 3090 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 3090 has significantly more memory with 24 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 significantly lower TDP at 145 W when compared to the GeForce RTX 3090 at 350 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce RTX 3090 is faster than the GeForce GTX 970.