In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX 480X 4GB are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 Palit 4GB Edition.

The RX 480X has a 100 MHz higher core clock speed and 152 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 970. This results in the RX 480X providing 185.2 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 RX 480X has a 100 MHz higher core clock speed and 72 more Render Output Units than the GTX 970. This results in the RX 480X providing 88.4 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The RX 480X was released over a year more recently than the GTX 970, and so the RX 480X is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 970.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The Radeon RX 480X 4GB and the GeForce GTX 970 Palit 4GB Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GTX 970 has 224.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the RX 480X, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 970 is massively better than the RX 480X.

The Radeon RX 480X 4GB has 4096 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 970 Palit 4GB Edition has 1664. However, the actual shader performance of the RX 480X is 5325 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 970 is 2646. The RX 480X having 2679 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the RX 480X delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 970.

The RX 480X transistor size technology is 14 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 970. This means that the RX 480X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 970.

The Radeon RX 480X 4GB requires 175 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 970 Palit 4GB Edition requires 150 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the RX 480X and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the GTX 970. The RX 480X requires 25 Watts more than the GTX 970 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the RX 480X to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GTX 970.