NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q vs AMD Radeon R9 280

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q 6 GB vs AMD Radeon R9 280 3 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Specifications
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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1789 points

39% slightly better overall score

1280 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

37 FPS

6 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

30 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

30 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

19 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

25 FPS

27 FPS

2 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

23 FPS

13 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

10 FPS

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3292 points

61% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

2043 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1480 MHz

78% significantly higher core clock speed

827 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1480 MHz

58% significantly higher boost clock speed

933 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

6 GiB

100% significantly more memory

3 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

192 Bit

384 Bit

100% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

192.2 GB/s

240 GB/s

24% slightly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

80 W

212% significantly lower TDP

250 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

71.04 Gigapixels/s

137% significantly higher pixel rate

29.86 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

118.4 Gigatexels/s

13% slightly higher texture rate

104.5 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.79 TFLOPS

13% slightly better floating point performance

3.34 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1280

1792

40% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

112

40% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

49% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

222nd of 586

244th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2017 June

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.1

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q vs Radeon R9 280 comparison

For gaming, the GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q graphics card is better than the Radeon R9 280 in our tests.

The GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q has a significantly higher core clock speed. This is the frequency at which the graphics core is running at. While not necessarily an indicator of overall performance, this metric can be useful when comparing two GPUs based on the same architecture. In addition, the GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q also has a significantly higher boost clock speed. This is a frequency that can be reached if the GPU is cooled sufficiently and has enough power.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q has significantly more memory with 6 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. If you're planning at playing games at high resolutions with high-quality textures, you will need a lot of memory.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q has a significantly lower TDP at 80 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280 at 250 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

In conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q over the Radeon R9 280.