In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 Leadtek WinFast Hurricane 4GB Edition.

The RX 480 has a 44 MHz higher core clock speed and 40 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 970. This results in the RX 480 providing 49.4 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 RX 480 has a 44 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 970, but the GTX 970 has 24 more Render Output Units than the RX 480. As a result, the GTX 970 exhibits a 24.5 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the RX 480. 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 Radeon RX 480 4GB and the GeForce GTX 970 Leadtek WinFast Hurricane 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 0.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the RX 480, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 970 is marginally better than the RX 480.

The Radeon RX 480 4GB has 2304 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 970 Leadtek WinFast Hurricane 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 2732. The RX 480 having 185 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the RX 480 delivers a slightly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 970.

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 4GB requires 120 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 970 Leadtek WinFast Hurricane 4GB Edition requires 150 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the RX 480 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the GTX 970. The GTX 970 requires 30 Watts more than the RX 480 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 480.