NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs AMD Radeon VII

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

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AMD Radeon VII

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 369.00

$ 576.00 significantly less expensive

$ 945.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

6138 points

171% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

107 FPS

60 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

100 FPS

66 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

106 FPS

75 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

56 FPS

28 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

9129 points

150% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

289.94 points

817.47 points

181% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595 points

68286 points

402% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29153 points

86533 points

196% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

34107 points

77122 points

126% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13595 points

77386 points

469% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

29277 points

92086 points

214% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

32348 points

91729 points

183% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

1400 MHz

33% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

1750 MHz

48% 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

4096 Bit

1500% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

1024 GB/s

356% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

106% significantly lower TDP

300 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

115.26 Gigapixels/s

74% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

432.24 Gigatexels/s

252% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

13.8 TFLOPS

252% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

3840

130% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

240

130% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

14% slightly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

193rd of 586

79th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon RX Vega Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2019 February

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

HBM2

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 VII comparison

In our benchmarks, the Radeon VII beats the GeForce GTX 970 in gaming performance.

Our database shows that the Radeon VII has a slightly 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 VII 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 VII has significantly more memory with 16 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 significantly lower TDP at 145 W when compared to the Radeon VII at 300 W. This is not a measure of performance, but rather the amount of heat generated by the chip when running at its highest speed.

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