NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 879.85

$ 349.00

$ 530.85 significantly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2494 points

2605 points

4% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

52 FPS

56 FPS

4 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

0 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

40 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

36 FPS

48 FPS

13 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

33 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

22 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

4376 points

4904 points

12% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

367.38 points

503.48 points

37% slightly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

15163 points

41242 points

171% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

33463 points

48577 points

45% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

41306 points

22% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

33781 points

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

15163 points

56001 points

269% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

34611 points

46502 points

34% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

38178 points

53890 points

41% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

1607 MHz

42% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1216 MHz

1845 MHz

51% significantly 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

100% significantly larger memory bus width

128 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

130 W

26% slightly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

77.82 Gigapixels/s

31% slightly higher pixel rate

59 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

162.36 Gigatexels/s

4% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

5.2 TFLOPS

4% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

45% significantly more shading units

1408

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

45% significantly 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

172nd of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon RX 5000 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2019 December

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

GDDR6

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

4.6

GeForce GTX 980 vs Radeon RX 5500 XT specs and performance

For gaming, the Radeon RX 5500 XT graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 980 in our tests.

Our database shows that the Radeon RX 5500 XT 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 Radeon RX 5500 XT also has a significantly higher boost clock speed. This is a frequency that can be reached if the GPU is cooled sufficiently and has enough power.

As stated by the manufacturer, the Radeon RX 5500 XT 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 Radeon RX 5500 XT has a slightly lower TDP at 130 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 980 at 165 W. This is not a measure of performance, but rather the amount of heat generated by the chip when running at its highest speed.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the Radeon RX 5500 XT is faster than the GeForce GTX 980.