GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M385X, which has core speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so in theory they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be a little bit (about 20%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M385X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12320 (20%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M is quite a bit (more or less 152%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 M385X, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26752 (152%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.