NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs AMD Radeon R9 280

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB vs AMD Radeon R9 280 3 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon R9 280

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 879.85

$ 399.00

$ 480.85 significantly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2494 points

94% significantly better overall score

1280 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

52 FPS

22 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

30 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

22 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

19 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

36 FPS

9 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

27 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

33 FPS

23 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

10 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

4376 points

114% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

2043 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

36% slightly higher core clock speed

827 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1216 MHz

30% slightly higher boost clock speed

933 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

33% slightly more memory

3 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

256 Bit

384 Bit

49% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

240 GB/s

6% slightly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

165 W

51% significantly lower TDP

250 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

77.82 Gigapixels/s

160% significantly higher pixel rate

29.86 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

48% significantly higher texture rate

104.5 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

48% significantly better floating point performance

3.34 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

14% slightly more shading units

1792

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

100% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

177th of 586

244th 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

GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon R9 280 comparison

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the GeForce GTX 980 GPU is faster than the Radeon R9 280 in gaming.

Our database shows that 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. 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 GTX 980 has slightly more memory with 4 GiB of memory compared to 3 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 significantly lower TDP at 165 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280 at 250 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 terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the GeForce GTX 980 is better than the Radeon R9 280.