GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M385X, which comes with clock speeds of 1100 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M is just a bit (approximately 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 should be quite a bit (approximately 152%) better at AA than the Radeon R9 M385X, and capable of handling higher screen resolutions while still performing well. (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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.