NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 879.85

$ 229.99

$ 649.86 significantly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2494 points

3468 points

39% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

52 FPS

82 FPS

30 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

0 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

36 FPS

59 FPS

23 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

33 FPS

1 FPS slightly higher Clouds frame rate

31 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

4376 points

6224 points

42% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

367.38 points

1484.67 points

304% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

29848 points

72998 points

144% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

33463 points

71667 points

114% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

41306 points

56109 points

35% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

34611 points

63483 points

83% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

38178 points

62406 points

63% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

1552 MHz

37% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1216 MHz

1777 MHz

46% significantly higher boost clock speed

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

256 Bit

100% significantly larger memory bus width

128 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

0.18% slightly higher memory bandwidth

224 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

165 W

130 W

26% slightly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

77.82 Gigapixels/s

36% slightly higher pixel rate

56.86 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

9% slightly higher texture rate

142.2 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

9.10 TFLOPS

82% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

2560

25% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

60% 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

177th of 586

139th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2022 January

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

GDDR6

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

4.6

GeForce GTX 980 vs GeForce RTX 3050 comparison

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the GeForce RTX 3050 GPU is faster than the GeForce GTX 980 in gaming.

Our database shows that the GeForce RTX 3050 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 RTX 3050 also has a significantly higher boost clock speed. This is a frequency that can be reached if the GPU is cooled sufficiently and has enough power.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the GeForce RTX 3050 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 RTX 3050 has a slightly lower TDP at 130 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 980 at 165 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 RTX 3050 is better than the GeForce GTX 980.