In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 EVGA Superclocked ACX 2.0 4GB Edition.

The GTX 970 has a 45 MHz higher core clock speed than the RX 480, but the RX 480 has 40 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 970. As a result, the RX 480 exhibits a 40.1 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 45 MHz higher core clock speed and 24 more Render Output Units than the RX 480. This results in the GTX 970 providing 29.4 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 480 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 970, and so the RX 480 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 480 has 4096 MB more video memory than the GTX 970, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the RX 480 also has superior memory performance overall.

The RX 480 has 31.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 970, which means that the memory performance of the RX 480 is noticeably better than the GTX 970.

The Radeon RX 480 8GB has 2304 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 970 EVGA Superclocked ACX 2.0 4GB Edition has 1664. However, the actual shader performance of the RX 480 is 2917 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 970 is 2959. The GTX 970 having 42 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the RX 480 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

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

The Radeon RX 480 8GB requires 150 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 500 Watts for the RX 480 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the GTX 970. The two GPUs require the same amount of wattage to run. As such, there is no need to worry about which will more significantly affect your yearly electricity bills.