NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs AMD Radeon RX 480

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 480 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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AMD Radeon RX 480

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 879.85

$ 789.13 significantly less expensive

$ 1668.98

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2494 points

16% slightly better overall score

2142 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

8 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

33 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

36 FPS

45 FPS

10 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

33 FPS

15 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

17 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

4376 points

5% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

4130 points

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

367.38 points

5% slightly higher Blender score

349.71 points

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

15163 points

42415 points

179% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

33463 points

44522 points

33% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

41306 points

48947 points

18% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

15163 points

51028 points

236% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

34611 points

42732 points

23% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

38178 points

49182 points

28% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

1266 MHz

12% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1216 MHz

1266 MHz

4% slightly higher boost clock speed

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

Identical

256 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

0.18% slightly higher memory bandwidth

224 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

92% significantly higher pixel rate

40.51 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

182.3 Gigatexels/s

17% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

5.83 TFLOPS

17% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

2304

12% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

144

12% slightly 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

199th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon RX 400 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2016 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 RX 480 specs and performance

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the GeForce GTX 980 GPU is faster than the Radeon RX 480 in gaming.

The Radeon RX 480 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 Radeon RX 480 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.

As stated by the manufacturer, the Radeon RX 480 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 Radeon RX 480 has a slightly lower TDP at 150 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 980 at 165 W. Heat output doesn't match power consumption directly but, it's a good estimate.

In conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the GeForce GTX 980 over the Radeon RX 480.