In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX 490X 8GB are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 EVGA Superclocked ACX 2.0 4GB Edition.

The GTX 970 has a 165 MHz higher core clock speed than the RX 490X, but the RX 490X has 280 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 970. As a result, the RX 490X exhibits a 262.8 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 970. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 970 has a 165 MHz higher core clock speed than the RX 490X, but the RX 490X has 72 more Render Output Units than the GTX 970. As a result, the RX 490X exhibits a 62.8 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 970. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The RX 490X was released over a year more recently than the GTX 970, and so the RX 490X 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 RX 490X has 4096 MB more video memory than the GTX 970, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the GTX 970 has superior memory performance.

The GTX 970 has 224.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the RX 490X, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 970 is massively better than the RX 490X.

The Radeon RX 490X 8GB has 6144 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 970 EVGA Superclocked ACX 2.0 4GB Edition has 1664. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 970 is 2959. The RX 490X having 3185 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the RX 490X delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 970.

The RX 490X transistor size technology is 14 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 970. This means that the RX 490X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 970.

The Radeon RX 490X 8GB requires 250 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 970 EVGA Superclocked ACX 2.0 4GB Edition requires 150 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the RX 490X and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the GTX 970. The RX 490X requires 100 Watts more than the GTX 970 to run. The difference is significant enough that the RX 490X may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 970.