NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 16 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 4080

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 369.00

$ 930.99 significantly less expensive

$ 1299.99

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

19480 points

761% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

480 FPS

433 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

226 FPS

191 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

334 FPS

302 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

183 FPS

155 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

6585 points

80% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

8733.11 points

2912% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

241464 points

724% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

217807 points

573% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

2025 MHz

92% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

2375 MHz

101% significantly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

16 GiB

300% 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

678.4 GB/s

202% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

189% significantly lower TDP

420 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

228 Gigapixels/s

245% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

760 Gigatexels/s

520% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

48.64 TFLOPS

1140% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

10240

515% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

320

207% 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

9th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2022 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 4080 comparison

For gaming, the GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 970 in our tests.

In our comparison, the GeForce RTX 4080 has a significantly 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 4080 also has a significantly 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 4080 has significantly more memory with 16 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 significantly lower TDP at 145 W when compared to the GeForce RTX 4080 at 420 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 4080 over the GeForce GTX 970.