NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 369.00

$ 1450.99 significantly less expensive

$ 1819.99

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

33119 points

1364% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

787 FPS

740 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

382 FPS

347 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

567 FPS

535 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

318 FPS

290 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

9236 points

153% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

11723.75 points

3943% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

318192 points

986% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

273214 points

744% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

2235 MHz

112% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

2520 MHz

113% 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

1010 GB/s

350% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

210% significantly lower TDP

450 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

483.8 Gigapixels/s

633% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

1290 Gigatexels/s

953% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

82.58 TFLOPS

2006% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

16384

884% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

512

392% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

192

242% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

193rd of 586

2nd of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2022 October

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 4090 benchmarks

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the GeForce RTX 4090 GPU is faster than the GeForce GTX 970 in gaming.

Our database shows that the GeForce RTX 4090 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 4090 also has a significantly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

As stated by the manufacturer, the GeForce RTX 4090 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 4090 at 450 W. This is not a measure of performance, but rather the amount of heat generated by the chip when running at its highest speed.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce RTX 4090 is faster than the GeForce GTX 970.