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 680 Galaxy Edition.

The GTX 680 has a 110 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 290, but the R9 290 has 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 680. As a result, the R9 290 exhibits a 17.9 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 680. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 680 has a 110 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 290, but the R9 290 has 32 more Render Output Units than the GTX 680. As a result, the R9 290 exhibits a 28.5 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 680. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R9 290 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 680, and so the R9 290 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 680.

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 Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The R9 290 has 140.5 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 680, which means that the memory performance of the R9 290 is massively better than the GTX 680.

The Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition has 2560 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition has 1536. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 290 is 2176 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 680 is 1806. The R9 290 having 370 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 680.

The Radeon R9 290 Sapphire Tri-X OC Edition requires 275 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition requires 195 Watts. 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 680. The R9 290 requires 80 Watts more than the GTX 680 to run. The difference is significant enough that the R9 290 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 680.