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GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

The GeForce GTX 970 comes with a core clock speed of 1050 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also features a 256-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1664 SPUs, 104 Texture Address Units, and 64 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which has a clock frequency of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 12 nm design. It is made up of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970 145 Watts
Radeon RX 590 175 Watts
Difference: 30 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon RX 590 should in theory be a little bit superior to the GeForce GTX 970 in general. (explain)

Radeon RX 590 262144 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970 224000 MB/sec
Difference: 38144 (17%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be much (about 94%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

Radeon RX 590 211536 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970 109200 Mtexels/sec
Difference: 102336 (94%)

Pixel Rate

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

GeForce GTX 970 67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590 47008 Mpixels/sec
Difference: 20192 (43%)

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

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GeForce GTX 970

Amazon.com

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Radeon RX 590

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce GTX 970 Radeon RX 590
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year September 2014 November 2018
Code Name GM204-200 Polaris 30
Memory 4096 MB 8192 MB
Core Speed 1050 MHz 1469 MHz
Memory Speed 7000 MHz 8000 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 145 watts 175 watts
Bandwidth 224000 MB/sec 262144 MB/sec
Texel Rate 109200 Mtexels/sec 211536 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 67200 Mpixels/sec 47008 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 1664 2304
Texture Mapping Units 104 144
Render Output Units 64 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit
Fab Process 28 nm 12 nm
Transistors 5200 million 5700 million
Bus PCIe 3.0 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11.2 DirectX 12.0
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.5 OpenGL 4.5

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface 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 better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 per second.

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

Display Prices

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GeForce GTX 970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon RX 590

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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