In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SLI are massively better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 Gigabyte XTREME 4GB Edition.

The RTX 2080 Ti has a 160 MHz higher core clock speed and 168 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 970. This results in the RTX 2080 Ti providing 243.4 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 RTX 2080 Ti has a 160 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Render Output Units than the GTX 970. This results in the RTX 2080 Ti providing 52.2 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 RTX 2080 Ti was released over a year more recently than the GTX 970, and so the RTX 2080 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 RTX 2080 Ti has 7168 MB more video memory than the GTX 970, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the RTX 2080 Ti also has superior memory performance overall.

The RTX 2080 Ti has 388.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 970, which means that the memory performance of the RTX 2080 Ti is massively better than the GTX 970.

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SLI has 4352 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 970 Gigabyte XTREME 4GB Edition has 1664. However, the actual shader performance of the RTX 2080 Ti is 7116 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 970 is 3015. The RTX 2080 Ti having 4101 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the RTX 2080 Ti delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 970.

The RTX 2080 Ti transistor size technology is 16 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 970. This means that the RTX 2080 Ti is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 970.

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti SLI requires 260 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 970 Gigabyte XTREME 4GB Edition requires 148 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 650 Watts for the RTX 2080 Ti and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 970. The RTX 2080 Ti requires 112 Watts more than the GTX 970 to run. The difference is significant enough that the RTX 2080 Ti may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 970.