NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 vs AMD Radeon R9 280

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 8 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

$ 365.00

$ 34.00 slightly less expensive

$ 399.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

4905 points

283% significantly better overall score

1280 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

94 FPS

63 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

30 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

79 FPS

60 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

19 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

62 FPS

36 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

27 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

64 FPS

54 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

10 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

7547 points

269% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

2043 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1607 MHz

94% significantly higher core clock speed

827 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1733 MHz

85% significantly higher boost clock speed

933 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

8 GiB

166% significantly more memory

3 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

256 Bit

384 Bit

49% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

320.3 GB/s

33% slightly higher memory bandwidth

240 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

180 W

38% slightly lower TDP

250 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

110.9 Gigapixels/s

271% significantly higher pixel rate

29.86 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

277.3 Gigatexels/s

165% significantly higher texture rate

104.5 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

8.87 TFLOPS

165% significantly better floating point performance

3.34 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2560

42% many more shading units

1792

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

160

42% many more texture mapping units

112

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

100% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

104th of 586

244th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2016 May

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5X

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

GeForce GTX 1080 vs Radeon R9 280 specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 1080 beats the Radeon R9 280 in gaming performance.

The GeForce GTX 1080 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 1080 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.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the GeForce GTX 1080 has significantly more memory with 8 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 1080 has a slightly lower TDP at 180 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280 at 250 W. Heat output doesn't match power consumption directly but, it's a good estimate.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce GTX 1080 is faster than the Radeon R9 280.