AMD Radeon R9 280X vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

VS

AMD Radeon R9 280X NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

We compared two Desktop platform GPUs: 3GB VRAM Radeon R9 280X and 4GB VRAM GeForce GTX 970 to see which GPU has better performance in key specifications, benchmark tests, power consumption, etc.

Main Differences

AMD Radeon R9 280X 's Advantages

Larger VRAM bandwidth (288.0GB/s vs 224.4GB/s)

384 additional rendering cores

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 's Advantages

Released 11 months late

Boost Clock has increased by 18% (1178MHz vs 1000MHz)

More VRAM (4GB vs 3GB)

Lower TDP (148W vs 250W)

Score

Benchmark

FP32 (float)

Radeon R9 280X +4%

4.096 TFLOPS

GeForce GTX 970

3.92 TFLOPS

3DMark Time Spy

Radeon R9 280X

2343

GeForce GTX 970 +54%

3622

Radeon R9 280X

VS

GeForce GTX 970

Graphics Card

Oct 2013

Release Date

Sep 2014

Volcanic Islands

Generation

GeForce 900

Desktop

Type

Desktop

PCIe 3.0 x16

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

Clock Speeds

850 MHz

Base Clock

1050 MHz

1000 MHz

Boost Clock

1178 MHz

1500 MHz

Memory Clock

1753 MHz

Memory

3GB

Memory Size

4GB

GDDR5

Memory Type

GDDR5

384bit

Memory Bus

256bit

288.0GB/s

Bandwidth

224.4GB/s

Render Config

-

SM Count

-

32

Compute Units

-

2048

Shading Units

1664

128

TMUs

104

32

ROPs

56

-

Tensor Cores

-

RT Cores

-

16 KB (per CU)

L1 Cache

48 KB (per SMM)

768 KB

L2 Cache

2 MB

Theoretical Performance

32.00 GPixel/s

Pixel Rate

65.97 GPixel/s

128.0 GTexel/s

Texture Rate

122.5 GTexel/s

-

FP16 (half)

-

4.096 TFLOPS

FP32 (float)

3.920 TFLOPS

1024 GFLOPS

FP64 (double)

122.5 GFLOPS

Graphics Processor

Tahiti

GPU Name

GM204

Tahiti XTL (215-0821065)

GPU Variant

GM204-200-A1

GCN 1.0

Architecture

Maxwell 2.0

TSMC

Foundry

TSMC

28 nm

Process Size

28 nm

4.313 billion

Transistors

5.2 billion

352 mm²

Die Size

398 mm²

Board Design

250W

TDP

148W

600 W

Suggested PSU

300 W

2x DVI 1x HDMI 1.4a 1x DisplayPort 1.2

Outputs

1x DVI 1x HDMI 2.0 3x DisplayPort 1.4a

1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin

Power Connectors

2x 6-pin

Graphics Features

12 (11_1)

DirectX

12 (12_1)

4.6

OpenGL

4.6

1.2

OpenCL

3.0

1.2

Vulkan

1.3

-

CUDA

5.2

5.1

Shader Model

6.4

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