NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 vs AMD Radeon R9 290X

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB vs AMD Radeon R9 290X 4 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

Benchmark Score
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Specifications
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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2086 points

9% slightly better overall score

1901 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

44 FPS

0 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

34 FPS

6 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

28 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

28 FPS

39 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

27 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

15 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3636 points

3987 points

9% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

32388 points

43067 points

32% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

31476 points

48969 points

55% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

32365 points

43342 points

33% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

30916 points

44042 points

42% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

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

108% significantly lower TDP

250 W

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

209th of 604

220th of 604

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

4.6

GeForce GTX 1060 vs Radeon R9 290X benchmarks

In our benchmarks, the Radeon R9 290X beats the GeForce GTX 1060 in gaming performance.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the GeForce GTX 1060 has significantly more memory with 6 GiB of memory compared to 4 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 290X 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 290X over the GeForce GTX 1060.