NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M

Compare NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M 3 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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GPU Comparison

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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

5276 points

264% significantly better overall score

1446 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

126 FPS

96 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

30 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

61 FPS

39 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

22 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

88 FPS

69 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

19 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

48 FPS

30 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

18 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

8766 points

284% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

2280 points

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

2317.27 points

1022% significantly higher Blender score

206.38 points

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

99213 points

442% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

18285 points

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

96416 points

381% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

20012 points

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

74845 points

244% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

21753 points

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

89510 points

360% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

19440 points

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

86221 points

339% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

19602 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1320 MHz

42% much higher core clock speed

924 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1777 MHz

71% significantly higher boost clock speed

1038 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

12 GiB

300% significantly more memory

3 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

192 Bit

Identical

192 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

360 GB/s

199% significantly higher memory bandwidth

120.3 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

170 W

75 W

126% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

85.3 Gigapixels/s

71% significantly higher pixel rate

49.82 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

199 Gigatexels/s

139% significantly higher texture rate

83.04 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

12.74 TFLOPS

379% significantly better floating point performance

2.66 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

3584

180% significantly more shading units

1280

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

112

40% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

Identical

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

98th of 586

238th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2021 January

2014 October

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR6

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.6

4.5

GeForce RTX 3060 vs GeForce GTX 970M comparison

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the GeForce RTX 3060 GPU is faster than the GeForce GTX 970M in gaming.

In our comparison, the GeForce RTX 3060 has a much 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 RTX 3060 also has a significantly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the GeForce RTX 3060 has significantly more memory with 12 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 970M has a significantly lower TDP at 75 W when compared to the GeForce RTX 3060 at 170 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce RTX 3060 is faster than the GeForce GTX 970M.