In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD FirePro W4170M are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 445M v2.

The FirePro W4170M has a 255 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the GT 445M. This results in the FirePro W4170M providing 6.1 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The FirePro W4170M has a 255 MHz higher core clock speed than the GT 445M, but the GT 445M has 8 more Render Output Units than the FirePro W4170M. As a result, the GT 445M exhibits a 2.5 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the FirePro W4170M. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The FirePro W4170M was released over three years more recently than the GT 445M, and so the FirePro W4170M is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GT 445M when running the latest games.

The FirePro W4170M has 1024 MB more video memory than the GT 445M, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the FirePro W4170M also has superior memory performance overall.

The FirePro W4170M has 32 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GT 445M, which means that the memory performance of the FirePro W4170M is noticeably better than the GT 445M.

The GeForce GT 445M v2 has 144 Shader Processing Units and the FirePro W4170M has 384. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 445M is 164 and the actual shader performance of the FirePro W4170M is 294. The FirePro W4170M having 130 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the FirePro W4170M delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GT 445M.

The FirePro W4170M transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GT 445M. This means that the FirePro W4170M is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GT 445M.

The GeForce GT 445M v2 requires 35 Watts to run and the FirePro W4170M requires 50 Watts. The FirePro W4170M requires 15 Watts more than the GT 445M to run. The difference is not significant enough for the FirePro W4170M to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GT 445M.