NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Mobile vs XFX Radeon R9 Nano 4gb (R9-FURY-4SF6)

Because both graphics units have the same number of Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs) and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Mobile card has higher operating frequency, its pixel fillrate is higher. Having better pixel fillrate allows the GPU 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.

Although it has lower graphics clock, the Radeon R9 Nano 4gb card comes with twice as many TMUs (Texture Mapping Units), resulting in substantially better texture fill rate. Having better maximum texture fill rate allows the GPU to utilize more sophisticated 3D effects and/or map more textures to each textured picture element, which improves games visual appearance.

Maximum Single Precision performance shows how many single-precision floating point operations the graphics 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 faster they run at, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The XFX Radeon R9 Nano 4gb graphics card has a big advantage here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics card will perform better in general computing applications. Since CUDA cores or stream processors are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

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 GPU to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth is dependent on a few components, like memory type, speed, and width of memory interface. Specifically, higher memory bandwidth of the XFX Radeon R9 Nano 4gb graphics card is a direct result of wider memory bus.