NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 vs AMD Radeon R9 280X

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

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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

5276 points

212% significantly better overall score

1687 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

126 FPS

86 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

40 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

61 FPS

36 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

25 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

88 FPS

53 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

35 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

48 FPS

34 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

14 FPS

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

8766 points

273% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

2350 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1320 MHz

55% significantly higher core clock speed

850 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1777 MHz

77% significantly higher boost clock speed

1000 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

25% slightly higher memory bandwidth

288 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

166% significantly higher pixel rate

32 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

199 Gigatexels/s

55% significantly higher texture rate

128 Gigatexels/s

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

12.74 TFLOPS

211% significantly better floating point performance

4.10 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

3584

75% significantly more shading units

2048

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

112

128

14% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

49% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

98th of 586

226th 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

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.6

4.5

GeForce RTX 3060 vs Radeon R9 280X specs and performance

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

In our comparison, 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. This is a frequency that can be reached if the GPU is cooled sufficiently and has enough power.

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. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce RTX 3060 has a significantly lower TDP at 170 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280X at 250 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 RTX 3060 over the Radeon R9 280X.