NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs AMD Radeon R9 270

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB vs AMD Radeon R9 270 2 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon R9 270

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 879.85

$ 107.15 slightly less expensive

$ 987.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2494 points

209% significantly better overall score

807 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

52 FPS

33 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

19 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

28 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

12 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

36 FPS

19 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

17 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

33 FPS

27 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

6 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

4376 points

171% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

1610 points

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

33463 points

49% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

22331 points

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

34611 points

52% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

22701 points

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

31% slightly higher boost clock speed

925 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

100% significantly more memory

2 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

256 Bit

Identical

256 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

11120% significantly higher memory bandwidth

2 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

165 W

150 W

10% slightly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

77.82 Gigapixels/s

162% significantly higher pixel rate

29.6 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

110% significantly higher texture rate

74 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

110% significantly better floating point performance

2.37 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

60% significantly more shading units

1280

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

280th 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

4.6

GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon R9 270 comparison

For gaming, the GeForce GTX 980 graphics card is better than the Radeon R9 270 in our tests.

The GeForce GTX 980 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 GTX 980 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 the GeForce GTX 980 has significantly more memory with 4 GiB of memory compared to 2 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the Radeon R9 270 has a slightly lower TDP at 150 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 980 at 165 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 GTX 980 over the Radeon R9 270.