NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 vs AMD Radeon R9 280

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 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

$ 369.00

$ 30.00 slightly less expensive

$ 399.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2262 points

76% significantly better overall score

1280 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

47 FPS

16 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

30 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

35 FPS

16 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

19 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

31 FPS

5 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

27 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

28 FPS

18 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

10 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

3647 points

78% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

2043 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1050 MHz

26% 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

256 Bit

384 Bit

49% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

240 GB/s

6% slightly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

145 W

72% significantly lower TDP

250 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

65.97 Gigapixels/s

120% significantly higher pixel rate

29.86 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

122.5 Gigatexels/s

17% slightly higher texture rate

104.5 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.92 TFLOPS

17% slightly better floating point performance

3.34 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1664

1792

7% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

104

112

7% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

75% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

193rd of 586

244th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

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 970 vs Radeon R9 280 specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 970 beats the Radeon R9 280 in gaming performance.

The GeForce GTX 970 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 970 also has a slightly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the GeForce GTX 970 has slightly more memory with 4 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 970 has a significantly lower TDP at 145 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 terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the GeForce GTX 970 is better than the Radeon R9 280.