GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon R9 M385X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M385X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1500 MHz on this specific model. It features 896 SPUs along with 56 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 970 should in theory be much better than the Radeon R9 M385X in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (133%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is a lot (more or less 77%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon R9 M385X. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		61600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 47600 (77%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M385X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 49600 (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can 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 the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.