NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs AMD Radeon R9 280

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 4 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

$ 265.00

$ 134.00 significantly less expensive

$ 399.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1419 points

10% slightly better overall score

1280 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

29 FPS

30 FPS

1 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

22 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

19 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

20 FPS

27 FPS

7 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

17 FPS

7 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

10 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2293 points

12% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

2043 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1127 MHz

36% slightly higher core clock speed

827 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

26% slightly higher boost clock speed

933 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

33% slightly more memory

3 GiB

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

112.2 GB/s

240 GB/s

113% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

120 W

108% significantly lower TDP

250 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

37.7 Gigapixels/s

26% slightly higher pixel rate

29.86 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

75.39 Gigatexels/s

104.5 Gigatexels/s

38% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

2.41 TFLOPS

3.34 TFLOPS

38% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1024

1792

75% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

112

75% 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

239th of 586

244th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2015 January

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 960 vs Radeon R9 280 comparison

For gaming, the Radeon R9 280 graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 960 in our tests.

The GeForce GTX 960 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 960 also has a slightly higher boost clock speed. The boost clock speed is the frequency that the GPU core can reach if the temperature is low enough. The allows for higher performance in certain scenarios.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the GeForce GTX 960 has slightly more memory with 4 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 960 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 Radeon R9 280 over the GeForce GTX 960.