AMD Radeon R9 M390X vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

AMD Radeon R9 M390X

The AMD Radeon R9 M390X is a mobile high-end graphics card for laptops. It is most likely based on the same chip as the AMD Radeon R9 M295X in the iMac 5K Late 2014. That means it should be based on the third generation of GCN (desktop Tonga chip). The amount of shader cores is identical but the core clock is reduced by 15% (from 850 MHz to 723 MHz) and the memory is also clocked slower (5448 MHz vs 5000 MHz).

The performance should be a bit below the M295X. Compared to the competition, the R9-M390X should be positioned somewhere between the GeForce GTX 965M and 970M and therefore suitable for high-end games in 1080p resolution and high detail settings.

The card was first mentioned by Alienware on their twitter account and should feature 4GB VRAM according to the tweet.

The power consumption should be rated around 100 Watt TDP and therefore suited only for large and bulky laptops (like the Alienware M17x it was announced in).

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 is a desktop graphics card of the upper middle class. It is based on the GM206 Maxwell chip that is produced in 28nm. The GTX960 offers 1024 shader cores, 64 TMUs and 32 ROPs (no deactivated units of the chip). The graphics memory is usually 2 or 4 GB GDDR5 (7 GHz effective clock) connected with a 128 Bit interface. 

On average the gaming performance is on a level with the AMD Radeon R9 280 and R9 285. Compared to laptop graphics cards, the 960 is slightly faster than a mobile Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M. The 970M offers more shader cores, but at a lower clock speed. The similar named GeForce GTX 960M for notebooks offers only 640 shader cores and a slightly lower core clock. The performance of the GTX 960 should be suffice for most games in full HD resolution. In our benchmarks only GTA 5 and The Witcher 3 achieved below 30 fps on average (see below for detailed benchmarks).

The GM206 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 GTX 960 also includes a H.265 capable de- and encoder as a first.

The power consumption of the GTX 960 on the desktop without load is around 10 Watt and on a similar level to the AMD counterparts. During gaming the 960 reaches around 85-100 Watt (depending on the model) which is a lot less than e.g. the Radeon R9 285 (around 170 Watt) - source tomshardware.com

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 is a high-end desktop graphics card based on the second generation Maxwell architecture. The GM204 chip is manufactured in 28 nm at TSMC. Compared to the older GeForce GTX 780Ti, the 980 offers similar performance levels but at reduced average power consumption. The similarly named Nvidia Geforce GTX 980M for notebooks is based on the same chip, but uses less shader cores and slower clock speeds for reduced performance. Since end of 2015, the GTX 980 is also used in laptops (same chip with same clocks and branding).

The Geforce GTX 980 supports a range of unique features like CUDA, 3D Vision, PhysX, GeForce Experience, GameStream, GPU Boost 3.0, Adaptive Vertical-Sync / G-Sync, SLI, DSR, MFAA and Virtual Reality latency improvements.