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

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q 6 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

1789 points

6% slightly better overall score

1687 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

37 FPS

40 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

30 FPS

5 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

25 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

25 FPS

35 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

23 FPS

9 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

14 FPS

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3292 points

40% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

2350 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1480 MHz

74% significantly higher core clock speed

850 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1480 MHz

47% significantly higher boost clock speed

1000 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

288 GB/s

49% significantly 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

121% significantly higher pixel rate

32 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

118.4 Gigatexels/s

128 Gigatexels/s

8% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.79 TFLOPS

4.10 TFLOPS

8% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1280

2048

60% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

60% significantly 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

226th 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 280X benchmarks

In our benchmarks, the Radeon R9 280X beats the GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q in gaming performance.

The GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q 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 1060 Max-Q 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.

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. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 1060 Max-Q has a significantly lower TDP at 80 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280X at 250 W. This is not a measure of performance, but rather the amount of heat generated by the chip when running at its highest speed.

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