NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs AMD Radeon RX 550

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 550 4 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon RX 550

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 369.00

$ 225.00

$ 144.00 significantly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

264% significantly better overall score

621 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

31 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

15 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

21 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

14 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

15 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

16 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

18 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

10 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

206% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

1190 points

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595 points

18838 points

38% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

108% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

14002 points

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

114% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

15900 points

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595 points

19855 points

46% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

137% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

12342 points

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

99% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

16237 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

1100 MHz

4% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1183 MHz

0.42% slightly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

Identical

4 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

256 Bit

100% significantly larger memory bus width

128 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

100% significantly higher memory bandwidth

112 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

50 W

190% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

248% significantly higher pixel rate

18.93 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

223% significantly higher texture rate

37.86 Gigatexels/s

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

224% significantly more shading units

512

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

224% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

250% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

193rd of 586

305th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon RX 500 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2017 April

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 550 benchmarks

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the GeForce GTX 970 GPU is faster than the Radeon RX 550 in gaming.

In our comparison, the Radeon RX 550 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. In addition, the Radeon RX 550 also has a slightly higher boost clock speed. The boost clock speed is the frequency that the GPU core can reach if the temperature is low enough. The allows for higher performance in certain scenarios.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that they both have the same amount of memory at 4 GiB. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

In addition, the Radeon RX 550 has a significantly lower TDP at 50 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 970 at 145 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 terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the GeForce GTX 970 is better than the Radeon RX 550.