In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 Palit JetStream 2GB Edition.

The GTX 770 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 290, but the R9 290 has 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 770. As a result, the R9 290 exhibits a 12.8 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 770. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 770 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 290, but the R9 290 has 32 more Render Output Units than the GTX 770. As a result, the R9 290 exhibits a 27.2 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 770. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R9 290 was released less than a year after the GTX 770, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The R9 290 has 2048 MB more video memory than the GTX 770, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R9 290 also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 290 has 108.5 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 770, which means that the memory performance of the R9 290 is massively better than the GTX 770.

The Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition has 2560 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 770 Palit JetStream 2GB Edition has 1536. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 290 is 2176 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 770 is 1846. The R9 290 having 330 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 290 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 770.

The Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition requires 275 Watts to run but there is no entry for the GeForce GTX 770 Palit JetStream 2GB Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the R9 290 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 770. The R9 290 has been recommended a PSU with 200 Watts more than the GTX 770. The difference is significant enough that the R9 290 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 770.