NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M 3 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M 4 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Specifications
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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1446 points

1650 points

14% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

30 FPS

32 FPS

1 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

22 FPS

25 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

19 FPS

22 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

18 FPS

21 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2280 points

2939 points

28% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

206.38 points

264.38 points

28% slightly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

18285 points

21520 points

17% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

20012 points

23785 points

18% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

21753 points

26093 points

19% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

19440 points

24516 points

26% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

19602 points

23881 points

21% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

924 MHz

1038 MHz

12% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1038 MHz

1127 MHz

8% slightly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

3 GiB

4 GiB

33% slightly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

192 Bit

256 Bit

33% slightly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

120.3 GB/s

160.4 GB/s

33% slightly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

75 W

33% slightly lower TDP

100 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

49.82 Gigapixels/s

72.13 Gigapixels/s

44% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

83.04 Gigatexels/s

108.2 Gigatexels/s

30% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

2.66 TFLOPS

3.46 TFLOPS

30% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1280

1536

20% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

20% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

33% slightly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

238th of 586

229th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 October

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 970M vs GeForce GTX 980M comparison

In our benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 980M beats the GeForce GTX 970M in gaming performance.

Our database shows that the GeForce GTX 980M 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 GeForce GTX 980M also has a slightly 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, the GeForce GTX 980M has slightly more memory with 4 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 970M has a slightly lower TDP at 75 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 980M at 100 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 GeForce GTX 980M is better than the GeForce GTX 970M.