GeForce GTX 970 vs GeForce RTX 2060

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce RTX 2060, which comes with a clock frequency of 1365 MHz and a GDDR6 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also makes use of a 192-bit bus, and makes use of a 12 nm design. It is comprised of 1920 SPUs, 120 TAUs, and 48 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
GeForce RTX 2060		160 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (10%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce RTX 2060 will be 54% faster than the GeForce GTX 970 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce RTX 2060		344064 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 120064 (54%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce RTX 2060 is much (approximately 50%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

GeForce RTX 2060		163800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 54600 (50%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is superior to the GeForce RTX 2060, but only just. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce RTX 2060		65520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1680 (3%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.