In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 380 PowerColor PCS+ 2GB Edition are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition.

The R9 380 has a 330 MHz higher core clock speed and 56 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 470. This results in the R9 380 providing 73.4 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 R9 380 has a 330 MHz higher core clock speed but 8 fewer Render Output Units than the GTX 470. The lower ROP count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the R9 380 manages to provide 5.4 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 R9 380 was released over three years more recently than the GTX 470, and so the R9 380 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GTX 470 when running the latest games.

The R9 380 has 768 MB more video memory than the GTX 470, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R9 380 also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 380 has 52.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 470, which means that the memory performance of the R9 380 is much better than the GTX 470.

The Radeon R9 380 PowerColor PCS+ 2GB Edition has 1792 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition has 448. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 380 is 1493 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 470 is 582. The R9 380 having 911 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 380 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 470.

The R9 380 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 470. This means that the R9 380 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 470.

The Radeon R9 380 PowerColor PCS+ 2GB Edition requires 190 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition requires 215 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the R9 380 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 470. The GTX 470 requires 25 Watts more than the R9 380 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GTX 470 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the R9 380.