In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 are very slightly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 Leadtek WinFast Hurricane 4GB Edition.

The GeForce GTX 1060 has a 430 MHz higher core clock speed but 24 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 970. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the GeForce GTX 1060 manages to provide 8.6 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 GeForce GTX 1060 has a 430 MHz higher core clock speed but 8 fewer Render Output Units than the GTX 970. The lower ROP count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the GeForce GTX 1060 manages to provide 12 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GeForce GTX 1060 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 970, and so the GeForce GTX 1060 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 1060 has 2048 MB more video memory than the GTX 970, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The GTX 970 has 32.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce GTX 1060, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 970 is noticeably better than the GeForce GTX 1060.

The GeForce GTX 1060 has 1280 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 970 Leadtek WinFast Hurricane 4GB Edition has 1664. However, the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 1060 is 2953 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 970 is 2732. The GeForce GTX 1060 having 221 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GTX 970 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GeForce GTX 1060 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 970. This means that the GeForce GTX 1060 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 970.

The GeForce GTX 1060 requires 120 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 970 Leadtek WinFast Hurricane 4GB Edition requires 150 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the GeForce GTX 1060 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the GTX 970. The GTX 970 requires 30 Watts more than the GeForce GTX 1060 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 GeForce GTX 1060.