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

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

Although it has lower graphics clock rate, the XFX Radeon R9 Nano 4gb comes with twice as many TMUs (Texture Mapping Units), which results in considerably higher texture fill rate. Better texture fill rate means that the graphics card can use more complex 3D effects and/or map more textures to each texel, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

Single Precision performance is useful for estimating card's maximum speed in applications, that process primarily single-precision floating point data. This performance is measured in GFLOPS, or Giga (billions of) Floating Point Operations Per Second. As a rule, the more CUDA cores or stream processors the GPU has, and the the faster they run at, the higher Single Precision performance will be. The XFX Radeon R9 Nano 4gb graphics unit has a significant lead 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.

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 Radeon R9 Nano 4gb is faster when processing 64-bit floating-point numbers.

Memory bandwidth parameter specifies how much memory (in Gigabytes) the graphics card can read from or write to dedicated memory per second. Graphics 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 XFX Radeon R9 Nano 4gb GPU comes with wider memory bus. As a consequence, it has significantly higher memory bandwidth.