GeForce GTX 970 vs Radeon RX 480 4GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon RX 480 4GB, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1120 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1750 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 14 nm design. It is comprised of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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.

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 480 4GB		267 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 970		262 Sol/s
	Difference: 5 (2%)

Ethereum Mining Hash Rate

Radeon RX 480 4GB		25 Mh/s
GeForce GTX 970		19 Mh/s
	Difference: 6 (32%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 970		145 Watts
Radeon RX 480 4GB		150 Watts
	Difference: 5 Watts (3%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon RX 480 4GB will be 2% quicker than the GeForce GTX 970 overall, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		229376 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 970		224000 MB/sec
	Difference: 5376 (2%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 480 4GB should be quite a bit (more or less 48%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 970. (explain)

Radeon RX 480 4GB		161280 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 970		109200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52080 (48%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 970 should be a lot (more or less 88%) better at AA than the Radeon RX 480 4GB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 970		67200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 480 4GB		35840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 31360 (88%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.