In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 4GB are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon R9 270X Crossfire.

The GTX 980 has a 126 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 270X, but the R9 270X has 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 980. As a result, the R9 270X exhibits a 15.9 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 980. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 980 has a 126 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 270X and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 980 providing 8.1 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 980 was released less than a year after the R9 270X, 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 Radeon R9 270X Crossfire and the GeForce GTX 980 4GB have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The R9 270X has 134 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 980, which means that the memory performance of the R9 270X is massively better than the GTX 980.

The Radeon R9 270X Crossfire has 2560 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 980 4GB has 2048. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 270X is 2285 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 980 is 3362. The GTX 980 having 1077 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the R9 270X performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon R9 270X Crossfire requires 360 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 980 4GB requires 165 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the R9 270X and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the GTX 980. The R9 270X requires 195 Watts more than the GTX 980 to run. The difference is significant enough that the R9 270X may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 980.