NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT 16 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

Benchmark Score
Other Benchmarks
Specifications
Comments (0)
Popular Comparisons

GPU Comparison

Quickly search and compare graphics cards

AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 369.00

$ 380.99 significantly less expensive

$ 749.99

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

14445 points

538% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

292 FPS

245 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

213 FPS

178 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

260 FPS

229 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

124 FPS

96 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

Want to compare your graphics card against the GeForce GTX 970 and the Radeon RX 6950 XT? Download our free and quick PC Performance Test.

Download GPU Benchmark

Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

4221 points

15% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

2747.99 points

847% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595 points

224476 points

1551% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

176249 points

502% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

177326 points

448% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

1890 MHz

79% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

2310 MHz

96% significantly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

16 GiB

300% 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

576 GB/s

156% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

131% significantly lower TDP

335 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

295.7 Gigapixels/s

348% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

739.2 Gigatexels/s

503% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

23.65 TFLOPS

503% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

5120

207% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

320

207% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

128

128% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

193rd of 586

20th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon RX 6000 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2022 May

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 6950 XT specs and performance

For gaming, the Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 970 in our tests.

In our comparison, the Radeon RX 6950 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 6950 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 6950 XT has significantly more memory with 16 GiB of memory compared to 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 significantly lower TDP at 145 W when compared to the Radeon RX 6950 XT at 335 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the Radeon RX 6950 XT is faster than the GeForce GTX 970.