NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB GA104 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

VS

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB GA104

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

We compared two Desktop platform GPUs: 12GB VRAM GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB GA104 and 4GB VRAM GeForce GTX 970 to see which GPU has better performance in key specifications, benchmark tests, power consumption, etc.

Main Differences

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB GA104 's Advantages

Released 7 years 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

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 's Advantages

Lower TDP (148W vs 170W)

Score

Benchmark

FP32 (float)

GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB GA104 +225%

12.74 TFLOPS

GeForce GTX 970

3.92 TFLOPS

GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB GA104

VS

GeForce GTX 970

Graphics Card

Sep 2021

Release Date

Sep 2014

GeForce 30

Generation

GeForce 900

Desktop

Type

Desktop

PCIe 4.0 x16

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

Clock Speeds

1320 MHz

Base Clock

1050 MHz

1777 MHz

Boost Clock

1178 MHz

1875 MHz

Memory Clock

1753 MHz

Memory

12GB

Memory Size

4GB

GDDR6

Memory Type

GDDR5

192bit

Memory Bus

256bit

360.0GB/s

Bandwidth

224.4GB/s

Render Config

-

28

SM Count

-

3584

Shading Units

1664

112

TMUs

104

64

ROPs

56

112

Tensor Cores

-

28

RT Cores

-

128 KB (per SM)

L1 Cache

48 KB (per SMM)

3 MB

L2 Cache

2 MB

-

Theoretical Performance

113.7 GPixel/s

Pixel Rate

65.97 GPixel/s

199.0 GTexel/s

Texture Rate

122.5 GTexel/s

12.74 TFLOPS

FP16 (half)

-

12.74 TFLOPS

FP32 (float)

3.920 TFLOPS

199.0 GFLOPS

FP64 (double)

122.5 GFLOPS

Board Design

170W

TDP

148W

450 W

Suggested PSU

300 W

1x HDMI 2.1 3x DisplayPort 1.4a

Outputs

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

1x 12-pin

Power Connectors

2x 6-pin

Graphics Processor

GA104

GPU Name

GM204

GA104-150-KC-A1

GPU Variant

GM204-200-A1

Ampere

Architecture

Maxwell 2.0

Samsung

Foundry

TSMC

8 nm

Process Size

28 nm

17.4 billion

Transistors

5.2 billion

392 mm²

Die Size

398 mm²

Graphics Features

12 Ultimate (12_2)

DirectX

12 (12_1)

4.6

OpenGL

4.6

3.0

OpenCL

3.0

1.3

Vulkan

1.3

8.6

CUDA

5.2

6.7

Shader Model

6.4

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