NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs AMD Radeon RX 580

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 580 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon RX 580

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 879.85

$ 139.19

$ 740.66 significantly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2494 points

9% slightly better overall score

2281 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

52 FPS

5 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

47 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

6 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

34 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

14 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

18 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

4376 points

1% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

4328 points

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

367.38 points

390.99 points

6% slightly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

15163 points

44601 points

194% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

33463 points

49182 points

46% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

41306 points

54191 points

31% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

15163 points

52261 points

244% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

34611 points

45779 points

32% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

38178 points

53514 points

40% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

1257 MHz

11% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1216 MHz

1340 MHz

10% 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

256 GB/s

14% slightly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

165 W

12% slightly lower TDP

185 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

77.82 Gigapixels/s

81% significantly higher pixel rate

42.88 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

192.96 Gigatexels/s

24% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

6.18 TFLOPS

23% 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

192nd of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon RX 500 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2017 April

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 580 specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 980 beats the Radeon RX 580 in gaming performance.

Our database shows that the Radeon RX 580 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 580 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.

As stated by the manufacturer, the Radeon RX 580 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 slightly lower TDP at 165 W when compared to the Radeon RX 580 at 185 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 GeForce GTX 980 is faster than the Radeon RX 580.