GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon R9 M295X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M295X, which comes with a clock speed of 750 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970M		75 Watts
Radeon R9 M295X		125 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon R9 M295X should be 83% quicker than the GeForce GTX 970M in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		96000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (83%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M295X should be quite a bit (approximately 30%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 970M. (explain)

Radeon R9 M295X		96000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22080 (30%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M will be quite a bit (more or less 85%) better at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M295X, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M295X		24000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20352 (85%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. 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 quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.