In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 280X Crossfire are significantly better than the AMD Radeon R7 260X Crossfire.

The R7 260X has a 250 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X, but the R9 280X has 144 more Texture Mapping Units than the R7 260X. As a result, the R9 280X exhibits a 94.4 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the R7 260X. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R7 260X has a 250 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X, but the R9 280X has 32 more Render Output Units than the R7 260X. As a result, the R9 280X exhibits a 19.2 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 260X. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

Both the Radeon R7 260X Crossfire and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire were released at the same time, so are likely to be quite similar.

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 280X has 2048 MB more video memory than the R7 260X, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R9 280X also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 280X has 368 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 260X, which means that the memory performance of the R9 280X is massively better than the R7 260X.

The Radeon R7 260X Crossfire has 1792 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire has 4096. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 260X is 1676. The R9 280X having 2420 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 280X delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the R7 260X.

The Radeon R7 260X Crossfire requires 230 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire requires 550 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the R7 260X and a PSU with at least 1000 Watts for the R9 280X. The R9 280X requires 320 Watts more than the R7 260X to run. The difference is significant enough that the R9 280X may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 260X.