ASUS STRIX R7 370 OC 4GB GAMING vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

The maximum theoretical pixel fillrate is dependent on the number of ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines) and graphics frequency. The GeForce GTX 970 has a substantial lead here, as it operates at higher rate and has many more ROPs. Better pixel fill rate means that the graphics card can draw more pixels on and off screen each second, increasing overall performance, unless there are bottlenecks somewhere else.

The maximum texture fillrate depends on the number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units) and graphics clock rate. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 has a big advantage in this area, because it has many more TMUs and runs at higher frequency. Better maximum texture fill rate means that the GPU can apply more textures and/or use more complex 3D effects for each texel, which improves games visual appearance.

Single Precision performance illustrates how many single-precision floating point operations the card can execute per second. The performance is expressed in billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, or GFLOPS. Generally, the more stream processors or CUDA cores the graphics card has, and the the higher they are clocked, the better Single Precision performance will be. The GeForce GTX 970 is significantly faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the GPU 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. Games do not use double-precision arithmetics, therefore this characteristic is irrelevant to their performance. The ASUS STRIX R7 370 OC 4GB GAMING graphics card has an edge here.

To speed up processing, the GPUs store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the graphics card to run at higher display resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth is dependent on several components, like memory type, speed, and memory interface width. Specifically, the GeForce GTX 970 comes with higher clocked memory. Consequently, it has higher memory bandwidth.