NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Specifications
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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 335.00

$ 544.85 significantly less expensive

$ 879.85

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2077 points

2494 points

20% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

43 FPS

52 FPS

9 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

34 FPS

41 FPS

6 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

27 FPS

36 FPS

8 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

27 FPS

33 FPS

6 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3636 points

4376 points

20% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

370.89 points

0.96% slightly higher Blender score

367.38 points

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

31129 points

4% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

29848 points

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13531 points

15163 points

12% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

32388 points

33463 points

3% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

31476 points

41306 points

31% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

13531 points

15163 points

12% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

32365 points

34611 points

6% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

30916 points

38178 points

23% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1708 MHz

51% significantly higher core clock speed

1126 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

6 GiB

49% significantly more memory

4 GiB

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

120 W

37% slightly lower TDP

165 W

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

205th of 586

177th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

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 1060 vs GeForce GTX 980 comparison

In our benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 980 beats the GeForce GTX 1060 in gaming performance.

The GeForce GTX 1060 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.

As stated by the manufacturer, the GeForce GTX 1060 has significantly more memory with 6 GiB of memory compared to 4 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 has a slightly lower TDP at 120 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 980 at 165 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce GTX 980 is faster than the GeForce GTX 1060.