NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs AMD Radeon RX 480

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 480 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon RX 480

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 369.00

$ 1299.98 significantly less expensive

$ 1668.98

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

5% slightly better overall score

2142 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

2 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

44 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

2 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

33 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

45 FPS

14 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

17 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

Want to compare your graphics card against the GeForce GTX 970 and the Radeon RX 480? Download our free and quick PC Performance Test.

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

4130 points

13% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

349.71 points

20% slightly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595 points

42415 points

211% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

44522 points

52% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

48947 points

43% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595 points

51028 points

275% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

42732 points

45% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

49182 points

52% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

1266 MHz

20% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1266 MHz

7% slightly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

8 GiB

100% 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

0.18% slightly higher memory bandwidth

224 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

3% slightly lower TDP

150 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

62% significantly higher pixel rate

40.51 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

182.3 Gigatexels/s

48% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

5.83 TFLOPS

48% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

2304

38% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

144

38% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

75% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

193rd of 586

199th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon RX 400 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2016 June

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon RX 480 benchmarks

For gaming, the GeForce GTX 970 graphics card is better than the Radeon RX 480 in our tests.

Our database shows that the Radeon RX 480 has a slightly 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 Radeon RX 480 also has a slightly higher boost clock speed. This is a frequency that can be reached if the GPU is cooled sufficiently and has enough power.

As stated by the manufacturer, the Radeon RX 480 has significantly more memory with 8 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 slightly lower TDP at 145 W when compared to the Radeon RX 480 at 150 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 GTX 970 is faster than the Radeon RX 480.