NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 vs AMD Radeon R9 280

Compare NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12 GB vs AMD Radeon R9 280 3 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 284.17
$ 114.83 significantly less expensive
$ 399.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

5276 points
312% significantly better overall score
1280 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

126 FPS
96 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate
30 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

61 FPS
42 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate
19 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

88 FPS
62 FPS significantly higher City frame rate
27 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

48 FPS
38 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate
10 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

Want to compare your graphics card against the GeForce RTX 3060 and the Radeon R9 280? Download our free and quick PC Performance Test.

Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

8766 points
329% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score
2043 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1320 MHz
59% significantly higher core clock speed
827 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1777 MHz
90% significantly higher boost clock speed
933 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

12 GiB
300% significantly more memory
3 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

192 Bit
384 Bit
100% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

360 GB/s
49% significantly higher memory bandwidth
240 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

170 W
47% significantly lower TDP
250 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

85.3 Gigapixels/s
185% significantly higher pixel rate
29.86 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

199 Gigatexels/s
90% significantly higher texture rate
104.5 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

12.74 TFLOPS
280% significantly better floating point performance
3.34 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

3584
100% significantly more shading units
1792

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

112
Identical
112

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

48
49% significantly more render output processors
32

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

98th of 586
244th of 586

Family

The product line

-
Radeon R9 200 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2021 January
-

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR6
GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0
12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.6
4.5

GeForce RTX 3060 vs Radeon R9 280 comparison

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the GeForce RTX 3060 GPU is faster than the Radeon R9 280 in gaming.

Our database shows that the GeForce RTX 3060 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 GeForce RTX 3060 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.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the GeForce RTX 3060 has significantly more memory with 12 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

In addition, the GeForce RTX 3060 has a significantly lower TDP at 170 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280 at 250 W. Heat output doesn't match power consumption directly but, it's a good estimate.

In conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the GeForce RTX 3060 over the Radeon R9 280.

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