AMD Radeon R9 280 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB

Compare AMD Radeon R9 280 3 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 399.00

$ 289.00

$ 110.00 significantly less expensive

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1280 points

2058 points

60% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

30 FPS

42 FPS

12 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

19 FPS

33 FPS

14 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

27 FPS

Identical

27 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

10 FPS

29 FPS

19 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

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Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

827 MHz

1506 MHz

82% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

933 MHz

1708 MHz

83% significantly higher boost clock speed

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

384 Bit

100% significantly larger memory bus width

192 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

240 GB/s

24% slightly higher memory bandwidth

192.2 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

250 W

120 W

108% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

29.86 Gigapixels/s

81.98 Gigapixels/s

174% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

104.5 Gigatexels/s

123 Gigatexels/s

17% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.34 TFLOPS

3.94 TFLOPS

17% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1792

55% significantly more shading units

1152

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

112

55% significantly 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

244th of 586

206th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2016 August

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

4.6

Radeon R9 280 vs GeForce GTX 1060 3GB benchmarks

For gaming, the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB graphics card is better than the Radeon R9 280 in our tests.

In our comparison, the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB 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 GTX 1060 3GB also has a significantly higher boost clock speed: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB has a significantly lower TDP at 120 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280 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.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB is faster than the Radeon R9 280.