AMD Radeon R9 280 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

VS

AMD Radeon R9 280 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

We compared two Desktop platform GPUs: 3GB VRAM Radeon R9 280 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 280 's Advantages

Larger VRAM bandwidth (240.0GB/s vs 224.4GB/s)

128 additional rendering cores

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 's Advantages

Released 6 months late

Boost Clock has increased by 26% (1178MHz vs 933MHz)

More VRAM (4GB vs 3GB)

Lower TDP (148W vs 200W)

Score

Benchmark

FP32 (float)

Radeon R9 280

3.344 TFLOPS

GeForce GTX 970 +17%

3.92 TFLOPS

3DMark Time Spy

Radeon R9 280

2009

GeForce GTX 970 +80%

3622

Radeon R9 280

VS

GeForce GTX 970

Graphics Card

Mar 2014

Release Date

Sep 2014

Volcanic Islands

Generation

GeForce 900

Desktop

Type

Desktop

PCIe 3.0 x16

Bus Interface

PCIe 3.0 x16

Clock Speeds

827 MHz

Base Clock

1050 MHz

933 MHz

Boost Clock

1178 MHz

1250 MHz

Memory Clock

1753 MHz

Memory

3GB

Memory Size

4GB

GDDR5

Memory Type

GDDR5

384bit

Memory Bus

256bit

240.0GB/s

Bandwidth

224.4GB/s

Render Config

-

SM Count

-

28

Compute Units

-

1792

Shading Units

1664

112

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

29.86 GPixel/s

Pixel Rate

65.97 GPixel/s

104.5 GTexel/s

Texture Rate

122.5 GTexel/s

-

FP16 (half)

-

3.344 TFLOPS

FP32 (float)

3.920 TFLOPS

836.0 GFLOPS

FP64 (double)

122.5 GFLOPS

Graphics Processor

Tahiti

GPU Name

GM204

Tahiti PRO3 (215-0821330)

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

200W

TDP

148W

550 W

Suggested PSU

300 W

1x DVI 2x 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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