NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs AMD Radeon R9 280X

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

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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2494 points

47% significantly better overall score

1687 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

52 FPS

12 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

40 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

16 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

25 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

36 FPS

0 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

35 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

33 FPS

19 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

14 FPS

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

4376 points

86% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

2350 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

32% slightly higher core clock speed

850 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1216 MHz

21% slightly higher boost clock speed

1000 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

288 GB/s

28% 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

143% significantly higher pixel rate

32 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

21% slightly higher texture rate

128 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

21% slightly better floating point performance

4.10 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

Identical

2048

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

Identical

128

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

226th 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 280X specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 980 beats the Radeon R9 280X 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. In addition, the GeForce GTX 980 also has a slightly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the GeForce GTX 980 has slightly more memory with 4 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 980 has a significantly lower TDP at 165 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280X at 250 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 GTX 980 is better than the Radeon R9 280X.