NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop

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

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Specifications
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GPU Comparison

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2494 points

2624 points

5% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

52 FPS

64 FPS

12 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

9 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

32 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

36 FPS

45 FPS

10 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

33 FPS

8 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

25 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

367.38 points

1161.74 points

216% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

29848 points

58544 points

96% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

33463 points

55123 points

64% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

41306 points

47251 points

14% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

34611 points

51045 points

47% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

38178 points

53105 points

39% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

1238 MHz

9% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1216 MHz

1500 MHz

23% slightly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

Identical

4 GiB

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

16% slightly higher memory bandwidth

192 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

165 W

75 W

120% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

77.82 Gigapixels/s

130% significantly higher pixel rate

33.82 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

130% significantly higher texture rate

67.65 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

15% slightly better floating point performance

4.33 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

Identical

2048

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

100% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

178th of 597

173rd of 597

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2021 May

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 Laptop benchmarks

For gaming, the GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 980 in our tests.

In our comparison, the GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop 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 RTX 3050 Laptop 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 they both have the same amount of memory at 4 GiB. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

In addition, the GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop has a significantly lower TDP at 75 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 Laptop is better than the GeForce GTX 980.