AMD Radeon R9 280X vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB

Compare AMD Radeon R9 280X 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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Specifications
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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1687 points

2457 points

45% significantly better overall score

Flux Core frame rate

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

40 FPS

47 FPS

7 FPS slightly higher Flux Core frame rate

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

25 FPS

40 FPS

15 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

35 FPS

4 FPS slightly higher City frame rate

31 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

14 FPS

33 FPS

19 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

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Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

850 MHz

1506 MHz

77% significantly higher core clock speed

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1000 MHz

1709 MHz

70% 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

288 GB/s

49% significantly 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

32 Gigapixels/s

82.03 Gigapixels/s

156% significantly higher pixel rate

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

128 Gigatexels/s

136.7 Gigatexels/s

6% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

4.10 TFLOPS

1% slightly better floating point performance

4.04 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

2048

60% significantly more shading units

1280

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

49% significantly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

226th 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 280X vs GeForce GTX 1060 6GB benchmarks

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark, the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GPU is faster than the Radeon R9 280X in gaming.

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: the maximum frequency the chip can reach if power delivery and thermals allow.

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. Memory size doesn't directly affect performance, but too little memory will certainly degrade gaming performance.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB has a significantly lower TDP at 120 W when compared to the Radeon R9 280X 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 conclusion, all specs and GPU benchmarks considered, will recommend the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB over the Radeon R9 280X.