NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

VS

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

We compared two Desktop platform GPUs: 4GB VRAM GeForce GTX 970 and 12GB VRAM GeForce RTX 3060 to see which GPU has better performance in key specifications, benchmark tests, power consumption, etc.

Main Differences

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 's Advantages

Lower TDP (148W vs 170W)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 's Advantages

Released 6 years and 4 months late

Boost Clock has increased by 51% (1777MHz vs 1178MHz)

More VRAM (12GB vs 4GB)

Larger VRAM bandwidth (360.0GB/s vs 224.4GB/s)

1920 additional rendering cores

Score

Benchmark

FP32 (float)

GeForce GTX 970

3.92 TFLOPS

GeForce RTX 3060 +225%

12.74 TFLOPS

3DMark Time Spy

GeForce GTX 970

3625

GeForce RTX 3060 +141%

8767

Shadow of the Tomb Raider 2160p

GeForce GTX 970

15

GeForce RTX 3060 +193%

44

Shadow of the Tomb Raider 1440p

GeForce GTX 970

30

GeForce RTX 3060 +166%

80

Shadow of the Tomb Raider 1080p

GeForce GTX 970

40

GeForce RTX 3060 +190%

116

GTA 5 2160p

GeForce GTX 970

42

GeForce RTX 3060 +19%

50

GTA 5 1440p

GeForce GTX 970

44

GeForce RTX 3060 +86%

82

GTA 5 1080p

GeForce GTX 970

98

GeForce RTX 3060 +35%

133

GeForce GTX 970

VS

GeForce RTX 3060

Graphics Card

Sep 2014

Release Date

Jan 2021

GeForce 900

Generation

GeForce 30

Desktop

Type

Desktop

PCIe 3.0 x16

Bus Interface

PCIe 4.0 x16

Clock Speeds

1050 MHz

Base Clock

1320 MHz

1178 MHz

Boost Clock

1777 MHz

1753 MHz

Memory Clock

1875 MHz

Memory

4GB

Memory Size

12GB

GDDR5

Memory Type

GDDR6

256bit

Memory Bus

192bit

224.4GB/s

Bandwidth

360.0GB/s

Render Config

-

SM Count

28

-

Compute Units

-

1664

Shading Units

3584

104

TMUs

112

56

ROPs

48

-

Tensor Cores

112

-

RT Cores

28

48 KB (per SMM)

L1 Cache

128 KB (per SM)

2 MB

L2 Cache

3 MB

Theoretical Performance

65.97 GPixel/s

Pixel Rate

85.30 GPixel/s

122.5 GTexel/s

Texture Rate

199.0 GTexel/s

-

FP16 (half)

12.74 TFLOPS

3.920 TFLOPS

FP32 (float)

12.74 TFLOPS

122.5 GFLOPS

FP64 (double)

199.0 GFLOPS

Graphics Processor

GM204

GPU Name

GA106

GM204-200-A1

GPU Variant

GA106-300-A1

Maxwell 2.0

Architecture

Ampere

TSMC

Foundry

Samsung

28 nm

Process Size

8 nm

5.2 billion

Transistors

12 billion

398 mm²

Die Size

276 mm²

Board Design

148W

TDP

170W

300 W

Suggested PSU

450 W

1x DVI 1x HDMI 2.0 3x DisplayPort 1.4a

Outputs

1x HDMI 2.1 3x DisplayPort 1.4a

2x 6-pin

Power Connectors

1x 12-pin

Graphics Features

12 (12_1)

DirectX

12 Ultimate (12_2)

4.6

OpenGL

4.6

3.0

OpenCL

3.0

1.3

Vulkan

1.3

5.2

CUDA

8.6

6.4

Shader Model

6.6

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