NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs AMD Radeon R9 280X

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 4 GB vs AMD Radeon R9 280X 3 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1419 points

1687 points

18% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

29 FPS

40 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

22 FPS

25 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

20 FPS

35 FPS

15 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

17 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

14 FPS

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2293 points

2350 points

2% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1127 MHz

32% slightly higher core clock speed

850 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

17% slightly higher boost clock speed

1000 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

288 GB/s

156% 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

17% slightly higher pixel rate

32 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

75.39 Gigatexels/s

128 Gigatexels/s

69% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

2.41 TFLOPS

4.10 TFLOPS

69% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1024

2048

100% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

100% 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

226th 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 280X benchmarks

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the Radeon R9 280X GPU is faster than the GeForce GTX 960 in gaming.

In our comparison, 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 maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

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. 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 960 has a significantly lower TDP at 120 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280X 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 280X over the GeForce GTX 960.