GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon R9 M280X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M280X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular model. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 970M should in theory be just a bit superior to the Radeon R9 M280X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		88000 MB/sec
	Difference: 8000 (9%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be much (approximately 47%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon R9 M280X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23520 (47%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M is quite a bit (about 208%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M280X, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M280X		14400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29952 (208%)

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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.