AMD R9 390 vs Nvidia GTX 970 (2024)

834,238 User Benchmarks

Best Bench: 54% MSI(1462 3160)
Worst Bench: 43% MSI(1462 3160)

Poor: 43%Great: 54%

SPEED RANK: 131st / 715

The Nvidia GTX 970 is a game changer in terms of performance per watt and value for money. The GTX 970 is based on Nvidia's ground-breaking Maxwell architecture which delivers considerable clock for clock performance gains over Kepler, its predecessor. Comparing the GTX 970 and 780 Ti shows that the two cards offer comparable performance yet the new GTX 970 costs nearly half as much! Unsurprisingly Nvidia are discontinuing the 780 Ti as it's now largely redundant. These price to performance gains typically occur once or twice a decade and although the new Maxwell architecture will improve down the line with the release of the Ti/Titan versions, at the moment the 970 offers the best value for money on the market by miles. Since this summary was originally written AMD have slashed prices and older Nvidia models (780/780 Ti/770) have also been hugely discounted. See the latest value for money rankings here.^{[Jul '15GPUPro]}

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The new AMD R9 390 is the direct successor to the R9 290. Both cards share the same GPU but the R9 390 is factory overclocked. The R9 390 has a 5% higher stock GPU clock, and a substantial stock memory clock increase of 20%. Additionally the R9 390 sports a minimum of 8GB of VRAM versus 4GB on the R9 290. At the current price levels of $329, the R9 390 can't compete given that R9 290s can be had for around $260. The increased VRAM will rarely help even at ultra high resolutions and in any case, most 4K gamers are likely to seek more GPU power than the R9 390 has to offer. We have seen several samples of the R9 390 and they scored an effective speed of 88.5% which, as expected, matches the speeds seen on overclocked R9 290s. On the face of it purchasing an R9 290 at a discount and then manually overclocking will result in the same performance as an R9 390 but with a saving of around $70.^{[Jun '15GPUPro]}

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