AMD Radeon RX 550
vs
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

vs

GPU Comparison Result

Below are the results of a comparison of AMD Radeon RX 550 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 video cards based on key performance characteristics, as well as power consumption and much more.

Advantages

  • Higher Boost Clock: 1183MHz (1183MHz vs 1178MHz)
  • Newer Launch Date: April 2017 (April 2017 vs September 2014)
  • Larger Memory Size: 4GB (2GB vs 4GB)
  • Higher Bandwidth: 224.4 GB/s (112.0 GB/s vs 224.4 GB/s)
  • More Shading Units: 1664 (512 vs 1664)

Basic

AMD
Label Name
NVIDIA
April 2017
Launch Date
September 2014
Desktop
Platform
Desktop
Radeon RX 550
Model Name
GeForce GTX 970
Polaris
Generation
GeForce 900
1100MHz
Base Clock
1050MHz
1183MHz
Boost Clock
1178MHz
PCIe 3.0 x8
Bus Interface
PCIe 3.0 x16
2,200 million
Transistors
5,200 million
8
Compute Units
-
32
TMUs
?
Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) serve as components of the GPU, which are capable of rotating, scaling, and distorting binary images, and then placing them as textures onto any plane of a given 3D model. This process is called texture mapping.
104
GlobalFoundries
Foundry
TSMC
14 nm
Process Size
28 nm
GCN 4.0
Architecture
Maxwell 2.0

Memory Specifications

2GB
Memory Size
4GB
GDDR5
Memory Type
GDDR5
128bit
Memory Bus
?
The memory bus width refers to the number of bits of data that the video memory can transfer within a single clock cycle. The larger the bus width, the greater the amount of data that can be transmitted instantaneously, making it one of the crucial parameters of video memory. The memory bandwidth is calculated as: Memory Bandwidth = Memory Frequency x Memory Bus Width / 8. Therefore, when the memory frequencies are similar, the memory bus width will determine the size of the memory bandwidth.
256bit
1750MHz
Memory Clock
1753MHz
112.0 GB/s
Bandwidth
?
Memory bandwidth refers to the data transfer rate between the graphics chip and the video memory. It is measured in bytes per second, and the formula to calculate it is: memory bandwidth = working frequency × memory bus width / 8 bits.
224.4 GB/s

Theoretical Performance

18.93 GPixel/s
Pixel Rate
?
Pixel fill rate refers to the number of pixels a graphics processing unit (GPU) can render per second, measured in MPixels/s (million pixels per second) or GPixels/s (billion pixels per second). It is the most commonly used metric to evaluate the pixel processing performance of a graphics card.
65.97 GPixel/s
37.86 GTexel/s
Texture Rate
?
Texture fill rate refers to the number of texture map elements (texels) that a GPU can map to pixels in a single second.
122.5 GTexel/s
1211 GFLOPS
FP16 (half)
?
An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy.
-
75.71 GFLOPS
FP64 (double)
?
An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy, while single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.
122.5 GFLOPS
1.235 TFLOPS
FP32 (float)
?
An important metric for measuring GPU performance is floating-point computing capability. Single-precision floating-point numbers (32-bit) are used for common multimedia and graphics processing tasks, while double-precision floating-point numbers (64-bit) are required for scientific computing that demands a wide numeric range and high accuracy. Half-precision floating-point numbers (16-bit) are used for applications like machine learning, where lower precision is acceptable.
3.842 TFLOPS

Miscellaneous

512
Shading Units
?
The most fundamental processing unit is the Streaming Processor (SP), where specific instructions and tasks are executed. GPUs perform parallel computing, which means multiple SPs work simultaneously to process tasks.
1664
16 KB (per CU)
L1 Cache
48 KB (per SMM)
512KB
L2 Cache
2MB
50W
TDP
148W
1.2
Vulkan Version
?
Vulkan is a cross-platform graphics and compute API by Khronos Group, offering high performance and low CPU overhead. It lets developers control the GPU directly, reduces rendering overhead, and supports multi-threading and multi-core processors.
1.3
2.1
OpenCL Version
3.0
4.6
OpenGL
4.6
-
CUDA
5.2
12 (12_0)
DirectX
12 (12_1)
None
Power Connectors
2x 6-pin
16
ROPs
?
The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROPs) is primarily responsible for handling lighting and reflection calculations in games, as well as managing effects like anti-aliasing (AA), high resolution, smoke, and fire. The more demanding the anti-aliasing and lighting effects in a game, the higher the performance requirements for the ROPs; otherwise, it may result in a sharp drop in frame rate.
56
6.4
Shader Model
6.4
250W
Suggested PSU
300W

Benchmarks

Shadow of the Tomb Raider 2160p / fps
Radeon RX 550
6
GeForce GTX 970
15 +150%
Shadow of the Tomb Raider 1440p / fps
Radeon RX 550
12
GeForce GTX 970
29 +142%
Shadow of the Tomb Raider 1080p / fps
Radeon RX 550
21
GeForce GTX 970
41 +95%
GTA 5 1080p / fps
Radeon RX 550
86
GeForce GTX 970
96 +12%
FP32 (float) / TFLOPS
Radeon RX 550
1.235
GeForce GTX 970
3.842 +211%
3DMark Time Spy
Radeon RX 550
1171
GeForce GTX 970
3708 +217%
Vulkan
Radeon RX 550
12121
GeForce GTX 970
31919 +163%
OpenCL
Radeon RX 550
11737
GeForce GTX 970
26896 +129%
Hashcat / H/s
Radeon RX 550
40676
GeForce GTX 970
157087 +286%