AMD Radeon R9 280 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M

Compare AMD Radeon R9 280 3 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M 4 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

1280 points

1650 points

28% slightly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

30 FPS

32 FPS

1 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

19 FPS

25 FPS

6 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

27 FPS

4 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

22 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

10 FPS

21 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2043 points

2939 points

43% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

827 MHz

1038 MHz

25% slightly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

933 MHz

1127 MHz

20% 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

49% significantly higher memory bandwidth

160.4 GB/s

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

250 W

100 W

150% significantly lower TDP

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

29.86 Gigapixels/s

72.13 Gigapixels/s

141% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

104.5 Gigatexels/s

108.2 Gigatexels/s

3% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

3.34 TFLOPS

3.46 TFLOPS

3% slightly better floating point performance

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

16% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

100% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

245th of 586

231st of 586

Family

The product line

Radeon R9 200 Series

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2014 October

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

Radeon R9 280 vs GeForce GTX 980M specs and performance

For gaming, the GeForce GTX 980M graphics card is better than the Radeon R9 280 in our tests.

In our comparison, the GeForce GTX 980M 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 980M also has a slightly higher boost clock speed. This is a frequency that can be reached if the GPU is cooled sufficiently and has enough power.

As stated by the manufacturer, the GeForce GTX 980M has slightly more memory with 4 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 980M has a significantly lower TDP at 100 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.

In terms of raw gaming performance in our GPU benchmark, the GeForce GTX 980M is better than the Radeon R9 280.