GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon RX 480, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1120 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 2000 MHz on this specific model. It features 2304 SPUs along with 144 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

Radeon RX 480		13349 points
GeForce GTX 970		10867 points
	Difference: 2482 (23%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 480		280 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 970		262 Sol/s
	Difference: 18 (7%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 480		27 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
	Difference: 8 (42%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon RX 480		150 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 480 should in theory perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		262144 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 38144 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 is a lot (more or less 48%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

Radeon RX 480		161280 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52080 (48%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is much (more or less 88%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon RX 480, and capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480		35840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31360 (88%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill 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 get to the maximum fill rate.