NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 vs AMD Radeon R9 280

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 2 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

$ 255.00

$ 144.00 significantly less expensive

$ 399.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1038 points

1280 points

23% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

22 FPS

30 FPS

8 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

16 FPS

19 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

15 FPS

27 FPS

12 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

13 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

10 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

1900 points

2043 points

7% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1024 MHz

23% slightly higher core clock speed

827 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1188 MHz

27% slightly higher boost clock speed

933 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

2 GiB

3 GiB

49% significantly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

128 Bit

384 Bit

200% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

105.8 GB/s

240 GB/s

126% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

90 W

177% significantly lower TDP

250 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

38.02 Gigapixels/s

27% slightly higher pixel rate

29.86 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

57.02 Gigatexels/s

104.5 Gigatexels/s

83% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

1.82 TFLOPS

3.34 TFLOPS

83% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

768

1792

133% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

112

133% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

Identical

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

261st of 586

244th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2015 August

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 950 vs Radeon R9 280 benchmarks

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the Radeon R9 280 GPU is faster than the GeForce GTX 950 in gaming.

In our comparison, the GeForce GTX 950 has a slightly 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 950 also has a slightly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the Radeon R9 280 has significantly more memory with 3 GiB of memory compared to 2 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 950 has a significantly lower TDP at 90 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.

In conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the Radeon R9 280 over the GeForce GTX 950.