NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

Benchmark Score
Other Benchmarks
Specifications
Comments (0)
Popular Comparisons

GPU Comparison

Quickly search and compare graphics cards

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 540.90

$ 59.09 slightly less expensive

$ 599.99

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

24 %

51 %

112% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

50 FPS

123 FPS

74 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

60 FPS

19 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

35 FPS

86 FPS

52 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

33 FPS

47 FPS

14 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

Want to compare your graphics card against the GeForce GTX 980 and the GeForce RTX 3060? Download our free and quick PC Performance Test.

Download GPU Benchmark

Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

4375

8714

99% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

391.82

2445.24

524% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

29848

99213

232% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

33463

96416

188% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

41306

74845

81% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

27995

89470

219% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

40029

84353

110% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

1320 MHz

17% 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

12 GiB

200% significantly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

256 Bit

33% slightly larger memory bus width

192 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

360 GB/s

60% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

165 W

3% slightly lower TDP

170 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

77.82 Gigapixels/s

85.3 Gigapixels/s

9% slightly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

199 Gigatexels/s

27% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

12.74 TFLOPS

155% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

3584

75% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

14% slightly more texture mapping units

112

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

33% slightly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

101st of 549

41st of 549

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

September 2014

January 2021

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 3060 comparison

For gaming, the GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 980 in our tests.

The GeForce RTX 3060 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 3060 also has a significantly 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 RTX 3060 has significantly more memory with 12 GiB of memory compared to 4 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 980 has a slightly lower TDP at 165 W when compared to the GeForce RTX 3060 at 170 W. This is not a measure of performance, but rather the amount of heat generated by the chip when running at its highest speed.

In conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the GeForce RTX 3060 over the GeForce GTX 980.