NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs AMD Radeon RX 590

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 590 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon RX 590

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 469.00

$ 459.99

$ 9.01 slightly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

23 %

Identical

23 %

Flux Core frame rate

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

45 FPS

50 FPS

5 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

34 FPS

36 FPS

1 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

46 FPS

15 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

8 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

20 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3642

4742

30% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595

49268

262% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153

52086

78% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107

48483

42% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595

58251

328% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

24465

47224

93% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

31608

53283

68% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

1545 MHz

47% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1545 MHz

31% 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

20% slightly lower TDP

175 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

33% slightly higher pixel rate

49.54 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

222.48 Gigatexels/s

81% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

7.12 TFLOPS

81% 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

93rd of 363

92nd of 363

Family

The product line

Radeon 500 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

September 2014

November 2018

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 590 comparison

For gaming, the Radeon RX 590 graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 970 in our tests.

Our database shows that the Radeon RX 590 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 590 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 the Radeon RX 590 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 590 at 175 W. Heat output doesn't match power consumption directly but, it's a good estimate.

In terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the Radeon RX 590 is better than the GeForce GTX 970.