NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 vs AMD Radeon R9 280X

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 2 GB vs AMD Radeon R9 280X 3 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1159 points

1687 points

45% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

Volumetric ray casting test, a computationally expensive method of rendering high-quality scenes

26 FPS

40 FPS

14 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

18 FPS

25 FPS

7 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

18 FPS

35 FPS

17 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

14 FPS

0 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

14 FPS

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2076 points

2350 points

13% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1354 MHz

59% significantly higher core clock speed

850 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1455 MHz

45% significantly higher boost clock speed

1000 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

2 GiB

3 GiB

49% significantly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

128 Bit

384 Bit

200% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

112.1 GB/s

288 GB/s

156% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

75 W

233% significantly lower TDP

250 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

46.56 Gigapixels/s

45% significantly higher pixel rate

32 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

58.2 Gigatexels/s

128 Gigatexels/s

119% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

1.86 TFLOPS

4.10 TFLOPS

119% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

640

2048

220% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

220% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

Identical

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

253rd of 586

226th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2016 October

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

GeForce GTX 1050 vs Radeon R9 280X specs and performance

For gaming, the Radeon R9 280X graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 1050 in our tests.

In our comparison, the GeForce GTX 1050 has a significantly higher core clock speed. The core clock speed (or base speed) is the frequency at which the GPU core runs. This metric makes sense when comparing GPUs of a similar architecture or generation. In addition, the GeForce GTX 1050 also has a significantly higher boost clock speed. The boost clock speed is the frequency that the GPU core can reach if the temperature is low enough. The allows for higher performance in certain scenarios.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the Radeon R9 280X has significantly more memory with 3 GiB of memory compared to 2 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 1050 has a significantly lower TDP at 75 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280X at 250 W. Heat output doesn't match power consumption directly but, it's a good estimate.

In terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the Radeon R9 280X is better than the GeForce GTX 1050.