GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R5 M255, which features clock speeds of 940 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 320 SPUs as well as 20 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 970 should in theory be quite a bit better than the Radeon R5 M255 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M255		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 208000 (1300%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be much (about 481%) better at AF than the Radeon R5 M255. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 90400 (481%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 will be quite a bit (more or less 794%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R5 M255, and should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 59680 (794%)

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

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