NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs AMD Radeon RX 590

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 590 8 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon RX 590

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 879.85

$ 248.79

$ 631.06 significantly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2494 points

1% slightly better overall score

2466 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

52 FPS

0 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

52 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

3 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

38 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

36 FPS

52 FPS

16 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

33 FPS

13 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

20 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

4376 points

4729 points

8% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

15163 points

49268 points

224% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

33463 points

52086 points

55% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

41306 points

48483 points

17% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

15163 points

59450 points

292% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

34611 points

45746 points

32% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

38178 points

55240 points

44% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

1545 MHz

37% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1216 MHz

1545 MHz

27% 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

6% slightly lower TDP

175 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

77.82 Gigapixels/s

57% significantly higher pixel rate

49.54 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

222.48 Gigatexels/s

42% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

7.12 TFLOPS

42% significantly 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

179th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon RX 500 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2018 November

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 590 benchmarks

In our benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 980 beats the Radeon RX 590 in gaming performance.

In our comparison, the Radeon RX 590 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 590 also has a slightly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

As stated by the manufacturer, the Radeon RX 590 has significantly more memory with 8 GiB of memory compared to 4 GiB. If you're planning at playing games at high resolutions with high-quality textures, you will need a lot of memory.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 980 has a slightly lower TDP at 165 W when compared to the Radeon RX 590 at 175 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 conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the GeForce GTX 980 over the Radeon RX 590.