NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 vs AMD Radeon R9 280

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 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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AMD Radeon R9 280

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 335.00

$ 64.00 slightly less expensive

$ 399.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2077 points

62% significantly better overall score

1280 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

43 FPS

13 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

30 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

34 FPS

15 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

19 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

27 FPS

1 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

27 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

27 FPS

16 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

10 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3636 points

77% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

2043 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1708 MHz

106% significantly higher core clock speed

827 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

6 GiB

100% significantly more memory

3 GiB

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

120 W

108% significantly lower TDP

250 W

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

205th of 586

244th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

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 Radeon R9 280 comparison

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

Our database shows that 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 3 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 1060 has a significantly lower TDP at 120 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280 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 GeForce GTX 1060 over the Radeon R9 280.