NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT 16 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 879.85

$ 749.99

$ 129.86 slightly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2494 points

14445 points

479% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

52 FPS

292 FPS

240 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

213 FPS

172 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

36 FPS

260 FPS

225 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

33 FPS

124 FPS

92 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

4376 points

3% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

4221 points

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

367.38 points

2747.99 points

647% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

15163 points

224476 points

1380% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

34611 points

176249 points

409% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

38178 points

177326 points

364% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

1890 MHz

67% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1216 MHz

2310 MHz

89% significantly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

16 GiB

300% 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

576 GB/s

156% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

165 W

103% significantly lower TDP

335 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

77.82 Gigapixels/s

295.7 Gigapixels/s

279% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

739.2 Gigatexels/s

375% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

23.65 TFLOPS

374% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

5120

150% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

320

150% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

128

100% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

177th of 586

20th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon RX 6000 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2022 May

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 6950 XT benchmarks

For gaming, the Radeon RX 6950 XT graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 980 in our tests.

The Radeon RX 6950 XT has a significantly 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 6950 XT also has a significantly 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.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the Radeon RX 6950 XT has significantly more memory with 16 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 RX 6950 XT at 335 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 Radeon RX 6950 XT is faster than the GeForce GTX 980.