GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon R9 M270X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M270X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1125 MHz on this card. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 970M will be 33% faster than the Radeon R9 M270X overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		72000 MB/sec
	Difference: 24000 (33%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M will be much (more or less 155%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M270X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		29000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44920 (155%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be a lot (about 282%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M270X, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M270X		11600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 32752 (282%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.