NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs AMD Radeon R9 390X

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB vs AMD Radeon R9 390X 8 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

3736% significantly better overall score

65 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

52 FPS

27 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

25 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

18 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

23 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

36 FPS

6 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

30 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

2% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

4254 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

7% slightly higher core clock speed

1050 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1216 MHz

15% slightly higher boost clock speed

1050 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

15% slightly higher pixel rate

67.2 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

184.8 Gigatexels/s

18% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

5.91 TFLOPS

18% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

2816

37% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

176

37% 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

534th 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 390X specs and performance

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the GeForce GTX 980 GPU is faster than the Radeon R9 390X 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: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the Radeon R9 390X has significantly more memory with 8 GiB of memory compared to 4 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 390X at 275 W. Heat output doesn't match power consumption directly but, it's a good estimate.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce GTX 980 is faster than the Radeon R9 390X.