NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 369.00
$ 750.20 significantly less expensive
$ 1119.20

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points
24107 points
965% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS
560 FPS
514 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS
277 FPS
242 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS
407 FPS
375 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS
226 FPS
198 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

Want to compare your graphics card against the GeForce GTX 970 and the GeForce RTX 5080? Download our free and quick PC Performance Test.

Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points
8762 points
140% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score
Blender score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points
9133.30 points
3050% significantly higher Blender score
Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points
267906 points
815% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score
Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points
257198 points
695% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz
2295 MHz
118% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz
2617 MHz
122% 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
960 GB/s
327% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W
148% significantly lower TDP
360 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s
293.1 Gigapixels/s
344% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s
879.3 Gigatexels/s
617% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS
56.28 TFLOPS
1335% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664
10752
546% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104
336
223% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

56
112
100% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

193rd of 586
4th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September
2025 January

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5
GDDR7

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0
12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5
4.6

GeForce GTX 970 vs GeForce RTX 5080 comparison

For gaming, the GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 970 in our tests.

The GeForce RTX 5080 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 5080 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 5080 has significantly more memory with 16 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 5080 at 360 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 5080 is better than the GeForce GTX 970.

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