NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 vs AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 4 GB vs AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX 24 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 879.85

$ 863.63

$ 16.22 slightly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

2494 points

24895 points

898% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

52 FPS

529 FPS

476 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

41 FPS

351 FPS

310 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

36 FPS

477 FPS

442 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

33 FPS

207 FPS

175 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

4376 points

6837 points

56% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

367.38 points

4050.95 points

1002% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

34611 points

212685 points

514% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

38178 points

238996 points

526% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1126 MHz

1855 MHz

64% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1216 MHz

2500 MHz

105% significantly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

24 GiB

499% significantly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

256 Bit

384 Bit

49% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

224.4 GB/s

960 GB/s

327% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

165 W

115% significantly lower TDP

355 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

77.82 Gigapixels/s

480 Gigapixels/s

516% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

155.6 Gigatexels/s

960 Gigatexels/s

516% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.98 TFLOPS

61.42 TFLOPS

1133% significantly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

6144

200% significantly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

384

200% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

192

200% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

177th of 586

3rd of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon RX 7000 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 September

2022 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 7900 XTX comparison

For gaming, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 980 in our tests.

In our comparison, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX has a significantly 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 7900 XTX also has a significantly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the Radeon RX 7900 XTX has significantly more memory with 24 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 significantly lower TDP at 165 W when compared to the Radeon RX 7900 XTX at 355 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 Radeon RX 7900 XTX over the GeForce GTX 980.