GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon RX 480

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 480, which has GPU clock speed of 1120 MHz, and 8192 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 2000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 480 should perform just a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 should be a lot (approximately 48%) better at texture 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 quite a bit (about 88%) better at FSAA than the Radeon RX 480, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

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