NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT 4 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 369.00

$ 259.99

$ 109.01 significantly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

3023 points

33% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

64 FPS

17 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

46 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

56 FPS

25 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

2 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

26 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

4965 points

36% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

422.78 points

45% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

52512 points

80% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

39991 points

17% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

50916 points

73% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

59288 points

83% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

2310 MHz

120% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

2815 MHz

138% 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

300% significantly larger memory bus width

64 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

55% significantly higher memory bandwidth

144 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

107 W

35% slightly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

90.1 Gigapixels/s

36% slightly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

180.2 Gigatexels/s

47% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

5.77 TFLOPS

47% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

62% significantly more shading units

1024

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

62% significantly 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

154th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon RX 6000 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2022 January

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 6500 XT comparison

For gaming, the Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 970 in our tests.

In our comparison, the Radeon RX 6500 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 6500 XT 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.

As stated by the manufacturer, 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 Radeon RX 6500 XT has a slightly lower TDP at 107 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 6500 XT over the GeForce GTX 970.