GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon RX 580

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 580, which uses a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 1257 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 2000 MHz on this particular model. It features 2304 SPUs as well as 144 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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 580		13630 points
GeForce GTX 970		10867 points
	Difference: 2763 (25%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 580		315 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 970		262 Sol/s
	Difference: 53 (20%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 580		28 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
	Difference: 9 (47%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon RX 580		185 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 580 should perform a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 970 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		262144 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 38144 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 580 should be much (more or less 66%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

Radeon RX 580		181008 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71808 (66%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 is quite a bit (about 67%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon RX 580, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 580		40224 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26976 (67%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.