AMD Radeon R9 290X vs GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 970 Gaming (GV-N970G1 GAMING-4GD (rev. 1.0/1.1))

Although the GeForce GTX 970 Gaming card has fewer ROPs, it operates at higher rate, which means it has higher pixel fillrate. Having better pixel fillrate allows the graphics unit to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

Even though its graphics frequency is lower, the Radeon R9 290X graphics card comes with many more Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), resulting in better texture fill rate. Having better maximum texture fill rate allows the GPU to apply more textures, use more complex 3D effects for each texel, or render 3D image / game environment at higher resolutions without loss of detail.

Maximum Single Precision performance illustrates how many single-precision floating point operations the graphics card can execute per second. The performance is measured in billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, or GFLOPS. Generally, the faster CUDA cores or stream processors run at, and the more cores / processors the graphics card has, the better Single Precision performance will be. The Radeon R9 290X GPU is faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics unit will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

Maximum Double Precision performance is similar to the Single Precision performance, except that it applies to double-precision (64-bit) floating point operations. This characteristic is unimportant to games performance because games do not use double-precision arithmetics. The AMD Radeon R9 290X has an edge here.

Memory bandwidth parameter tells how much memory (in Gigabytes) the card can read from or write to dedicated memory per second. Cards with higher memory bandwidth have better performance at high display resolutions, or when using large and detailed textures, and/or utilizing complex 3D effects and filters, like anti-aliasing. Memory type, speed, and width of memory interface all affect the bandwidth value. Specifically, the AMD Radeon R9 290X GPU comes with wider memory bus. As a consequence, it has more memory bandwidth.