NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop 6 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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GPU Comparison

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2494 points

4534 points

81% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

52 FPS

112 FPS

60 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

57 FPS

16 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

36 FPS

78 FPS

42 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

33 FPS

44 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

367.38 points

2352.59 points

540% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

29848 points

98709 points

230% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

33463 points

92420 points

176% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

41306 points

71210 points

72% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

34611 points

84300 points

143% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

38178 points

82804 points

116% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

25% slightly higher core clock speed

900 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1216 MHz

1703 MHz

40% slightly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

5.97 GiB

49% 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

336 GB/s

49% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

165 W

80 W

106% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

77.82 Gigapixels/s

13% slightly higher pixel rate

68.4 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

171 Gigatexels/s

9% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

10.94 TFLOPS

119% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

3840

87% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

6% slightly more texture mapping units

120

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

177th of 586

111th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2021 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 3060 Laptop specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop beats the GeForce GTX 980 in gaming performance.

The GeForce GTX 980 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. Despite this, the GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop has a slightly higher boost clock speed. This is a frequency that can be reached if the GPU is cooled sufficiently and has enough power.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop has significantly more memory with 5.97 GiB of memory compared to 4 GiB. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop is faster than the GeForce GTX 980.