NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs AMD Radeon RX 560 (Laptop)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 is a high end desktop graphics card based on the Maxwell architecture. As the faster GTX 980, the GTX 970 uses the GM204 chip, but with reduced shaders (2048 vs. 1664) and TMUs (128 vs 103). The graphics card is equipped with 4 GB GDDR5 (7 GHz effective). 3.5 GB of the 4 GB are connected with 224 Bit, the rest only with a 32 Bit interface. This can lead to some stuttering or reduced frame rates in games that use the full 4 GB. The similar named mobile GeForce GTX 970M is clearly slower as it features only 1280 shader cores.

Despite the unique memory configuration, the GTX 970 performs on average on par with the older GeForce GTX 780 Ti or a AMD Radeon R9 290X.

The GM204 supports CUDA, 3D Vision, PhysX, GeForce Experience, Surround, GameStream, GPU Boost 2.0, Adaptive Vertical Sync / G-SYNC, SLI, DSR, MFAA and Virtual Reality latency improvements.

The Maxwell architecture is very power efficient. While gaming, the card only uses as much power as the Radeon R9 285 which is more than 35% slower on average.

AMD Radeon RX 560 (Laptop)

The AMD Radeon RX 560 for laptops (RX 560M) is a mid-range Polaris 11 / 21 gaming graphics card for laptops. It was first shown at CES 2017 in the Lenovo Legion Y520 as the "AMD RX 560M" with up to 4 GB GDDR5 VRAM. As the desktop RX 560 it can be based on the Polaris 21 and 11 chip (RX 560 and RX 460) with 986 or 1024 shaders. The performance should be similar to the desktop variants, with slightly reduced clock speeds.

More information on the Polaris architecture and its features can be found here.