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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs AMD Radeon RX 470

NVIDIA

GeForce GTX 970

AMD

Radeon RX 470

Specifications of GPUs

GeForce GTX 970

Radeon RX 470

GPU Comparison Result

Below are the results of a comparison of the characteristics and performance of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 and AMD Radeon RX 470 video cards. This comparison will help you determine which one best suits your needs.

Basic

Label Name

NVIDIA

AMD

Launch Date

September 2014

August 2016

Platform

Desktop

Model Name

GeForce GTX 970

Radeon RX 470

Generation

GeForce 900

Arctic Islands

Base Clock

1050MHz

926MHz

Boost Clock

1178MHz

1206MHz

Shading Units

The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.

1664

2048

Transistors

5,200 million

5,700 million

Compute Units

TMUs

Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.

104

128

L1 Cache

48 KB (per SMM)

16 KB (per CU)

L2 Cache

2MB

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

Foundry

TSMC

GlobalFoundries

Process Size

28 nm

14 nm

Architecture

Maxwell 2.0

GCN 4.0

TDP

148W

120W

Memory Specifications

Memory Size

4GB

Memory Type

GDDR5

Memory Bus

The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.

256bit

Memory Clock

1753MHz

1650MHz

Bandwidth

Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.

224.4 GB/s

211.2 GB/s

Display and Media

Outputs

1x DVI
1x HDMI 2.0
3x DisplayPort 1.4a

1x HDMI 2.0b
3x DisplayPort 1.4a

Theoretical Performance

Pixel Rate

Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.

65.97 GPixel/s

38.59 GPixel/s

Texture Rate

Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.

122.5 GTexel/s

154.4 GTexel/s

FP16 (half)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.

4.940 TFLOPS

FP64 (double)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

122.5 GFLOPS

308.7 GFLOPS

FP32 (float)

An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.

3.766 TFlops

4.841 TFlops

Miscellaneous

Vulkan Version

Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.

1.3

1.2

OpenCL Version

3.0

2.1

OpenGL

4.6

CUDA

5.2

DirectX

12 (12_1)

12 (12_0)

Power Connectors

2x 6-pin

1x 6-pin

ROPs

The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.

Shader Model

6.4

Suggested PSU

300W

Advantages

GeForce GTX 970

Higher Bandwidth: 224.4 GB/s (224.4 GB/s vs 211.2 GB/s)

Radeon RX 470

Higher Boost Clock: 1206MHz (1178MHz vs 1206MHz)
More Shading Units: 2048 (1664 vs 2048)
Newer Launch Date: August 2016 (September 2014 vs August 2016)

Radeon RX 470

Related GPU Comparisons

Radeon RX 570

AMD, April 2017

GeForce GTX 970

NVIDIA, September 2014

Radeon RX 470

AMD, August 2016

Radeon RX 570

AMD, April 2017