AMD Radeon R9 280 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB

Compare AMD Radeon R9 280 3 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 399.00

Identical

$ 399.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1280 points

2457 points

91% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

30 FPS

47 FPS

17 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

19 FPS

40 FPS

21 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

27 FPS

31 FPS

5 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

10 FPS

33 FPS

23 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

1709 MHz

83% significantly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

3 GiB

6 GiB

100% significantly more memory

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

82.03 Gigapixels/s

174% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

104.5 Gigatexels/s

136.7 Gigatexels/s

30% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.34 TFLOPS

4.04 TFLOPS

20% slightly better floating point performance

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1792

40% slightly more shading units

1280

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

112

40% 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

244th of 586

180th of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2016 July

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 6GB specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB beats the Radeon R9 280 in gaming performance.

In our comparison, the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB has a significantly 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 1060 6GB 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 GTX 1060 6GB has significantly more memory with 6 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. If you're planning at playing games at high resolutions with high-quality textures, you will need a lot of memory.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB has a significantly lower TDP at 120 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280 at 250 W. TDP (Thermal Design Power) measures total heat output from the chip.

In conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB over the Radeon R9 280.