AMD Radeon R9 280 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680

Compare AMD Radeon R9 280 3 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 4 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

Benchmark Score
Other Benchmarks
Specifications
Comments (0)
Popular Comparisons

GPU Comparison

Quickly search and compare graphics cards

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 399.00

$ 120.99 significantly less expensive

$ 519.99

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1280 points

1% slightly better overall score

1261 points

Flux Core frame rate

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

30 FPS

2 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

28 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

19 FPS

1 FPS slightly higher Electron frame rate

17 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

27 FPS

7 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

19 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

10 FPS

14 FPS

4 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

Free GPU Benchmark

Want to compare your graphics card against the Radeon R9 280 and the GeForce GTX 680? Download our free and quick PC Performance Test.

Download GPU Benchmark

Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2043 points

0.25% slightly higher 3DMark Graphics score

2038 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

827 MHz

1006 MHz

21% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

933 MHz

1058 MHz

13% slightly higher boost clock speed

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

3 GiB

4 GiB

33% slightly more memory

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

384 Bit

49% significantly larger memory bus width

256 Bit

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

240 GB/s

24% slightly higher memory bandwidth

192.3 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

250 W

195 W

28% slightly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

29.86 Gigapixels/s

33.86 Gigapixels/s

13% slightly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

104.5 Gigatexels/s

135.4 Gigatexels/s

29% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.34 TFLOPS

2% slightly better floating point performance

3.25 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1792

16% slightly more shading units

1536

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

Identical

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

245th 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

4.5

Radeon R9 280 vs GeForce GTX 680 benchmarks

In our benchmarks, the Radeon R9 280 beats the GeForce GTX 680 in gaming performance.

Our database shows that the GeForce GTX 680 has a slightly 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 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.

Next up, in terms of GPU memory, the GeForce GTX 680 has slightly more memory with 4 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 GTX 680 has a slightly lower TDP at 195 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 Radeon R9 280 over the GeForce GTX 680.