NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER is a high-end desktop graphics card based on the Ada Lovelace architecture. It uses the AD104 chip and offers 7,168 cores and 12 GB GDDR6X graphics memory (192-bit bus with 21 Gbits).

The performance of the RTX 4070S lies between the older RTX 4070 and RTX 4070 Ti in the top class of high-end GPUs in 2024. Compared to AMD GPUs, the 4070 Super is similar fast as the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT. This makes the GPU best suited for QHD and maximum details of demanding games (such as Avatar Frontiers of Pandora, Allan Wake 2, Cyberpunk 2033 or F1 23). Less demanding games can also be played smoothly in 4K (AC Mirage, Cod MW 3, ...).

The AD104 chip is produced at TSMC in 5 nm (4N with EUV) and is specified with a TGP (Total Graphics Power) of 200 watts.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 is a desktop graphics card of the upper middle class. It is based on the GM206 Maxwell chip that is produced in 28nm. The GTX960 offers 1024 shader cores, 64 TMUs and 32 ROPs (no deactivated units of the chip). The graphics memory is usually 2 or 4 GB GDDR5 (7 GHz effective clock) connected with a 128 Bit interface. 

On average the gaming performance is on a level with the AMD Radeon R9 280 and R9 285. Compared to laptop graphics cards, the 960 is slightly faster than a mobile Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M. The 970M offers more shader cores, but at a lower clock speed. The similar named GeForce GTX 960M for notebooks offers only 640 shader cores and a slightly lower core clock. The performance of the GTX 960 should be suffice for most games in full HD resolution. In our benchmarks only GTA 5 and The Witcher 3 achieved below 30 fps on average (see below for detailed benchmarks).

The GM206 supports CUDA, 3D Vision, PhysX, GeForce Experience, Surround, GameStream, GPU Boost 2.0, Adaptive Vertical Sync / G-SYNC, SLI, DSR, MFAA and Virtual Reality latency improvements. The GTX 960 also includes a H.265 capable de- and encoder as a first.

The power consumption of the GTX 960 on the desktop without load is around 10 Watt and on a similar level to the AMD counterparts. During gaming the 960 reaches around 85-100 Watt (depending on the model) which is a lot less than e.g. the Radeon R9 285 (around 170 Watt) - source tomshardware.com

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti is a High-End desktop graphics card based on the Maxwell architecture. It uses the big GM200 chip with 2,816 CUDA cores (versus 2048 of the GTX 980) and is manufactured in 28 nm. Together with the NVidia Titan X (that uses the same chip with more graphics memory), the 980Ti was the fastest single chip graphics card for desktops in 2015. In 2016 the new Pascal based GeForce GTX 1070 and 1080 however were faster while using less energy thanks to the new architecture and the 16 nm process.