NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs AMD Radeon RX 580

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 580 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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GPU Comparison

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AMD Radeon RX 580

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 369.00

$ 139.19

$ 229.81 significantly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

2281 points

0.84% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

0 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

0 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

34 FPS

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

10 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

18 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

4328 points

18% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

390.99 points

34% slightly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595 points

44601 points

228% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

49182 points

68% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

54191 points

58% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595 points

52261 points

284% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

45779 points

56% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

53514 points

65% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

1257 MHz

19% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1340 MHz

13% 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

256 GB/s

14% slightly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

27% slightly lower TDP

185 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

53% significantly higher pixel rate

42.88 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

192.96 Gigatexels/s

57% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

6.18 TFLOPS

57% 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

191st 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 580 comparison

For gaming, the GeForce GTX 970 graphics card is better than the Radeon RX 580 in our tests.

The Radeon RX 580 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 580 also has a slightly 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 580 has significantly more memory with 8 GiB of memory compared to 4 GiB. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 970 has a slightly lower TDP at 145 W when compared to the Radeon RX 580 at 185 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 GeForce GTX 970 over the Radeon RX 580.