NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 369.00

$ 349.00

$ 20.00 slightly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

2605 points

15% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

56 FPS

9 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

40 FPS

5 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

48 FPS

17 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

6 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

22 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

4904 points

34% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

503.48 points

73% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595 points

41242 points

203% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

48577 points

66% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

0.97% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

33781 points

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595 points

56001 points

311% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

46502 points

58% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

53890 points

66% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

1607 MHz

53% 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

8 GiB

100% significantly more memory

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

130 W

11% slightly lower TDP

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

172nd of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon RX 5000 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2019 December

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 XT benchmarks

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

The Radeon RX 5500 XT 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 Radeon RX 5500 XT also has a significantly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

As stated by the manufacturer, the Radeon RX 5500 XT 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 Radeon RX 5500 XT has a slightly lower TDP at 130 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 970 at 145 W. Heat output doesn't match power consumption directly but, it's a good estimate.

In conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the Radeon RX 5500 XT over the GeForce GTX 970.