In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 270X Crossfire are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 SLI.

The R9 270X has a 352 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the GTX 285. This results in the R9 270X providing 56.3 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R9 270X has a 352 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 285 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the R9 270X providing 22.5 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 R9 270X was released over three years more recently than the GTX 285, and so the R9 270X is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GTX 285 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 270X has 2048 MB more video memory than the GTX 285, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R9 270X also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 270X has 40.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 285, which means that the memory performance of the R9 270X is noticeably better than the GTX 285.

The Radeon R9 270X Crossfire has 2560 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 285 SLI has 480. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 270X is 2285 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 285 is 311. The R9 270X having 1974 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 270X delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 285.

The R9 270X transistor size technology is 27 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 285. This means that the R9 270X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 285.

The Radeon R9 270X Crossfire requires 360 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 285 SLI requires 408 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the R9 270X and a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the GTX 285. The GTX 285 requires 48 Watts more than the R9 270X to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 285 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R9 270X.