NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs AMD Radeon R9 390

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB vs AMD Radeon R9 390 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Specifications
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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2494 points

29% slightly better overall score

1919 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

52 FPS

8 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

44 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

12 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

28 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

36 FPS

39 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

33 FPS

17 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

15 FPS

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

4376 points

10% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

3950 points

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

33463 points

46328 points

38% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

41306 points

49594 points

20% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

34611 points

43704 points

26% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

38178 points

51251 points

34% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

12% slightly higher core clock speed

1000 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

8 GiB

100% significantly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

256 Bit

512 Bit

100% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

384 GB/s

71% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

165 W

66% significantly lower TDP

275 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

77.82 Gigapixels/s

21% slightly higher pixel rate

64 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

160 Gigatexels/s

2% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

5.12 TFLOPS

2% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

2560

25% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

160

25% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

Identical

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

177th of 586

215th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 300 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2015 June

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 390 comparison

For gaming, the GeForce GTX 980 graphics card is better than the Radeon R9 390 in our tests.

In our comparison, 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. 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 Radeon R9 390 has significantly more memory with 8 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 significantly lower TDP at 165 W when compared to the Radeon R9 390 at 275 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 390.