GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon RX 550

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 550, which makes use of a 14 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1750 MHz on this card. It features 512 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

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

GeForce GTX 970M		7520 points
Radeon RX 550		3507 points
	Difference: 4013 (114%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 550		50 Watts
GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 550 will be 19% quicker than the GeForce GTX 970M overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 550		114688 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 18688 (19%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M will be much (about 110%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon RX 550. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 550		35200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 38720 (110%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 970M is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 550		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26752 (152%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.