AMD Radeon R9 390X vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M

Compare AMD Radeon R9 390X 8 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M 3 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1474 points

1% slightly better overall score

1446 points

Flux Core frame rate

Volumetric ray casting test, a computationally expensive method of rendering high-quality scenes

41 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

30 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

28 FPS

6 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

22 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

39 FPS

20 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

19 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

16 FPS

18 FPS

2 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

4254 points

86% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

2280 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

13% slightly higher core clock speed

924 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1050 MHz

1% slightly higher boost clock speed

1038 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

8 GiB

166% significantly more memory

3 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

512 Bit

166% significantly larger memory bus width

192 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

384 GB/s

219% significantly higher memory bandwidth

120.3 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

275 W

75 W

266% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

67.2 Gigapixels/s

34% slightly higher pixel rate

49.82 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

184.8 Gigatexels/s

122% significantly higher texture rate

83.04 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

5.91 TFLOPS

122% significantly better floating point performance

2.66 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2816

120% significantly more shading units

1280

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

176

120% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

33% slightly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

237th of 592

241st of 592

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 300 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2015 June

2014 October

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

Radeon R9 390X vs GeForce GTX 970M comparison

In our benchmarks, the Radeon R9 390X beats the GeForce GTX 970M in gaming performance.

The Radeon R9 390X has a slightly higher core clock speed. The core clock speed (or base speed) is the frequency at which the GPU core runs. This metric makes sense when comparing GPUs of a similar architecture or generation. In addition, the Radeon R9 390X also has a slightly higher boost clock speed. The boost clock speed is the frequency that the GPU core can reach if the temperature is low enough. The allows for higher performance in certain scenarios.

As stated by the manufacturer, the Radeon R9 390X has significantly more memory with 8 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 970M has a significantly lower TDP at 75 W when compared to the Radeon R9 390X at 275 W. This is not a measure of performance, but rather the amount of heat generated by the chip when running at its highest speed.

In terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the Radeon R9 390X is better than the GeForce GTX 970M.