AMD Radeon R9 270 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680

Compare AMD Radeon R9 270 2 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 4 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 987.00

$ 519.99

$ 467.01 significantly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

807 points

1261 points

56% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

19 FPS

28 FPS

10 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

12 FPS

17 FPS

5 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

17 FPS

19 FPS

2 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

6 FPS

14 FPS

8 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

Want to compare your graphics card against the Radeon R9 270 and the GeForce GTX 680? Download our free and quick PC Performance Test.

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

1610 points

2038 points

26% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

22331 points

36% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

16368 points

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

22701 points

23% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

18409 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

900 MHz

1006 MHz

11% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

925 MHz

1058 MHz

14% slightly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

2 GiB

4 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

2 GB/s

192.3 GB/s

9515% significantly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

150 W

30% slightly lower TDP

195 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

29.6 Gigapixels/s

33.86 Gigapixels/s

14% slightly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

74 Gigatexels/s

135.4 Gigatexels/s

82% significantly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

2.37 TFLOPS

3.25 TFLOPS

37% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1280

1536

20% slightly more shading units

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

128

60% significantly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

Identical

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

279th of 586

246th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2012 March

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

11.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.6

4.5

Radeon R9 270 vs GeForce GTX 680 benchmarks

For gaming, the GeForce GTX 680 graphics card is better than the Radeon R9 270 in our tests.

The GeForce GTX 680 has a slightly 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 GeForce GTX 680 also has a slightly 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 GTX 680 has significantly more memory with 4 GiB of memory compared to 2 GiB. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the Radeon R9 270 has a slightly lower TDP at 150 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 680 at 195 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce GTX 680 is faster than the Radeon R9 270.