NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs AMD Radeon RX 5500

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 5500 4 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon RX 5500

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 369.00

$ 299.99

$ 69.01 slightly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

2707 points

19% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

60 FPS

14 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

41 FPS

6 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

51 FPS

20 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

5 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

23 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

4717 points

29% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

339.58 points

17% slightly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

40204 points

37% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

34601 points

1% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595 points

49159 points

261% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

44390 points

51% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

54355 points

68% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

1670 MHz

59% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1845 MHz

56% significantly 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

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

11% slightly higher pixel rate

59 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

162.36 Gigatexels/s

32% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

5.2 TFLOPS

32% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

18% slightly more shading units

1408

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

18% 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

166th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon RX 5000 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2019 July

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

GDDR6

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

4.6

GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon RX 5500 comparison

For gaming, the Radeon RX 5500 graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 970 in our tests.

The Radeon RX 5500 has a significantly 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 5500 also has a significantly higher boost clock speed. This is a frequency that can be reached if the GPU is cooled sufficiently and has enough power.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, they both have the same amount of memory at 4 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 970 has a slightly lower TDP at 145 W when compared to the Radeon RX 5500 at 150 W. Heat output doesn't match power consumption directly but, it's a good estimate.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the Radeon RX 5500 is faster than the GeForce GTX 970.