NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs AMD Radeon HD 8950

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs AMD Radeon HD 8950 3 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

Benchmark Score
Other Benchmarks
Specifications
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GPU Comparison

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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

804% significantly better overall score

250 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

40 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

7 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

29 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

6 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

23 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

9 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

25 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

3 FPS

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Other Benchmarks

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

79% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

16214 points

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

72% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

19779 points

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

113% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

13742 points

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

152% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

12796 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

23% slightly higher core clock speed

850 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

33% slightly more memory

3 GiB

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

55% significantly lower TDP

225 W

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

193rd of 586

398th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

11.1

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

4.4

GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon HD 8950 comparison

In our benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 970 beats the Radeon HD 8950 in gaming performance.

The GeForce GTX 970 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.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the GeForce GTX 970 has slightly more memory with 4 GiB of memory compared to 3 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 Radeon HD 8950 at 225 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

In conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the GeForce GTX 970 over the Radeon HD 8950.