NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs AMD Radeon R9 390X

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 4 GB vs AMD Radeon R9 390X 8 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

1474 points

3% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

29 FPS

41 FPS

12 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

22 FPS

28 FPS

7 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

20 FPS

39 FPS

19 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

18 FPS

2 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

16 FPS

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2293 points

4254 points

85% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1127 MHz

7% slightly higher core clock speed

1050 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

12% slightly higher boost clock speed

1050 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

8 GiB

100% significantly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

128 Bit

512 Bit

300% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

112.2 GB/s

384 GB/s

242% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

120 W

129% significantly lower TDP

275 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

37.7 Gigapixels/s

67.2 Gigapixels/s

78% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

75.39 Gigatexels/s

184.8 Gigatexels/s

145% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

2.41 TFLOPS

5.91 TFLOPS

145% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1024

2816

175% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

176

175% significantly more texture mapping units

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

242nd of 592

237th of 592

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 300 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2015 January

2015 June

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 390X specs and performance

For gaming, the Radeon R9 390X graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 960 in our tests.

The GeForce GTX 960 has a slightly 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 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.

As stated by the manufacturer, the Radeon R9 390X has significantly more memory with 8 GiB of memory compared to 4 GiB. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 960 has a significantly lower TDP at 120 W when compared to the Radeon R9 390X at 275 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 390X over the GeForce GTX 960.