NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti vs PowerColor Red Dragon RX VEGA56 8GB HBM2 (AXRX VEGA 56 8GBHBM2-2D2HD/OC)

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics card has higher pixel fill rate due to greater number of ROPs, even though its graphics frequency is lower. Having better pixel fillrate allows the graphics card to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

The maximum theoretical texture fillrate depends on the number of TMUs and graphics frequency. The PowerColor Red Dragon RX VEGA56 8GB HBM2 has an upper hand here, because not only it operates at higher frequency, but it also has more Texture Mapping Units (TMUs). Better maximum texture fill rate means that the GPU can utilize more complex 3D effects and/or apply more textures to each textured picture element, which improves games visual appearance.

Maximum Single Precision performance illustrates how good the card is at running programs, that make an extensive use of single-precision floating point numbers. This performance is measured in billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, or GFLOPS. All single-precision calculations are performed by CUDA cores or stream processors, therefore the more cores / processors the graphics unit has the better. Performance also depends on the processor clock rate. The Red Dragon RX VEGA56 8GB HBM2 is substantially faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the GPU will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

Maximum Double Precision performance is similar to the Single Precision performance, except that it applies to double-precision (64-bit) floating point operations. Since games do not use double-precision arithmetics, this characteristic is unimportant to games performance. The PowerColor Red Dragon RX VEGA56 8GB HBM2 has a massive lead here.

Memory bandwidth parameter specifies how much memory (in Gigabytes) the card can read from or write to dedicated memory per second. GPUs with higher memory bandwidth have better performance at high display resolutions, or when using large and detailed textures, and/or utilizing complex 3D effects and filters, like anti-aliasing. The bandwidth is dependent on memory type, speed, and memory interface width. Specifically, the PowerColor Red Dragon RX VEGA56 8GB HBM2 comes with wider memory bus. Consequently, it has more memory bandwidth.