GeForce GTX 970M vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 M380, which features core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so in theory they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be much (more or less 85%) better at AF than the Radeon R9 M380. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		73920 Mtexels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33920 (85%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970M should be a lot (approximately 177%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon R9 M380, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970M		44352 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28352 (177%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.