In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 Leadtek WinFast Hurricane 4GB Edition are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 Ti 4GB.

The GTX 970 has a 26 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 960 Ti. This results in the GTX 970 providing 11.1 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 970 has a 26 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 960 Ti, but the GTX 960 Ti has 8 more Render Output Units than the GTX 970. As a result, the GTX 960 Ti exhibits a 6.9 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 970. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 960 Ti was released over a year more recently than the GTX 970, and so the GTX 960 Ti is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 970.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The GeForce GTX 960 Ti 4GB and the GeForce GTX 970 Leadtek WinFast Hurricane 4GB Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The memory bandwidth of the GeForce GTX 960 Ti 4GB and the GeForce GTX 970 Leadtek WinFast Hurricane 4GB Edition are the same, which means the GTX 960 Ti and the GTX 970 have equal limitations when it comes to graphical data transfer.

The GeForce GTX 960 Ti 4GB has 1536 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 970 Leadtek WinFast Hurricane 4GB Edition has 1664. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 960 Ti is 1809 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 970 is 2732. The GTX 970 having 923 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 970 delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 960 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 960 Ti 4GB requires 140 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 970 Leadtek WinFast Hurricane 4GB Edition requires 150 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the GTX 960 Ti and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the GTX 970. The GTX 970 requires 10 Watts more than the GTX 960 Ti to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GTX 970 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GTX 960 Ti.