NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

About GPU

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 GPU is a reliable and powerful graphics card for desktop platforms. With a base clock of 1050MHz and a boost clock of 1178MHz, this GPU provides smooth and fast performance for a variety of tasks, including gaming, video editing, and graphic design. The 4GB of GDDR5 memory and a memory clock of 1753MHz ensure that the GTX 970 can handle demanding graphics and textures with ease. It also has 1664 shading units and 2MB of L2 cache, contributing to its impressive performance. In terms of power consumption, the GTX 970 has a TDP of 148W, making it relatively energy-efficient considering its high performance. The theoretical performance of 3.92 TFLOPS further demonstrates the GPU's capability to handle intensive workloads. Benchmark tests show that the GTX 970 performs exceptionally well. For instance, it scored 3635 in 3DMark Time Spy, and achieved 98 fps in GTA 5 at 1080p resolution. Even in more demanding titles like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it maintained a respectable 40 fps at 1080p resolution. Overall, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 GPU offers a balanced combination of power, efficiency, and performance. It is a great choice for both avid gamers and professionals who require a reliable and capable graphics card for their desktop systems.

Basic

Label Name
NVIDIA
Platform
Desktop
Launch Date
September 2014
Model Name
GeForce GTX 970
Generation
GeForce 900
Base Clock
1050MHz
Boost Clock
1178MHz
Bus Interface
PCIe 3.0 x16
Transistors
5,200 million
TMUs
?
Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.
104
Foundry
TSMC
Process Size
28 nm
Architecture
Maxwell 2.0

Memory Specifications

Memory Size
4GB
Memory Type
GDDR5
Memory Bus
?
The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.
256bit
Memory Clock
1753MHz
Bandwidth
?
Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.
224.4 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate
?
Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.
65.97 GPixel/s
Texture Rate
?
Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.
122.5 GTexel/s
FP64 (double)
?
An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.
122.5 GFLOPS
FP32 (float)
?
An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.
3.842 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

Shading Units
?
The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.
1664
L1 Cache
48 KB (per SMM)
L2 Cache
2MB
TDP
148W
Vulkan Version
?
Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.
1.3
OpenCL Version
3.0
OpenGL
4.6
DirectX
12 (12_1)
CUDA
5.2
Power Connectors
2x 6-pin
Shader Model
6.4
ROPs
?
The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.
56
Suggested PSU
300W

Benchmarks

Shadow of the Tomb Raider 2160p
Score
15 fps
Shadow of the Tomb Raider 1440p
Score
29 fps
Shadow of the Tomb Raider 1080p
Score
41 fps
GTA 5 2160p
Score
43 fps
GTA 5 1440p
Score
45 fps
GTA 5 1080p
Score
96 fps
FP32 (float)
Score
3.842 TFLOPS
3DMark Time Spy
Score
3708
Blender
Score
318
OctaneBench
Score
76
Vulkan
Score
31919
OpenCL
Score
26896

Compared to Other GPU

Shadow of the Tomb Raider 2160p / fps
26 +73.3%
1 -93.3%
Shadow of the Tomb Raider 1440p / fps
95 +227.6%
75 +158.6%
54 +86.2%
Shadow of the Tomb Raider 1080p / fps
141 +243.9%
107 +161%
79 +92.7%
46 +12.2%
GTA 5 2160p / fps
146 +239.5%
68 +58.1%
55 +27.9%
GTA 5 1440p / fps
103 +128.9%
82 +82.2%
62 +37.8%
GTA 5 1080p / fps
213 +121.9%
136 +41.7%
FP32 (float) / TFLOPS
4.073 +6%
3.981 +3.6%
3.612 -6%
3.454 -10.1%
3DMark Time Spy
4844 +30.6%
2325 -37.3%
1506 -59.4%
Vulkan
98839 +209.7%
69708 +118.4%
40716 +27.6%
5522 -82.7%
OpenCL
66428 +147%
46137 +71.5%
13442 -50%
8849 -67.1%