In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 Palit 4GB Edition are very slightly better than the AMD Radeon RX 470 4GB.

The GTX 970 has a 124 MHz higher core clock speed than the RX 470, but the RX 470 has 24 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 970. As a result, the RX 470 exhibits a 9.3 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 124 MHz higher core clock speed and 24 more Render Output Units than the RX 470. This results in the GTX 970 providing 29.2 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 470 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 970, and so the RX 470 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 470 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 13.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the RX 470, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 970 is slightly better than the RX 470.

The Radeon RX 470 4GB has 2048 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 970 Palit 4GB Edition has 1664. However, the actual shader performance of the RX 470 is 2470 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 970 is 2646. The GTX 970 having 176 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 970 delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the RX 470.

The RX 470 transistor size technology is 14 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 970. This means that the RX 470 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 970.

The Radeon RX 470 4GB requires 120 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 970 Palit 4GB Edition requires 150 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the RX 470 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the GTX 970. The GTX 970 requires 30 Watts more than the RX 470 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GTX 970 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the RX 470.