In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 270X Crossfire are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 SLI.

The R9 270X has a 190 MHz higher core clock speed and 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 560. This results in the R9 270X providing 69.3 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 190 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 560 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the R9 270X providing 12.2 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 a year more recently than the GTX 560, and so the R9 270X is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 560.

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 560, 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 102.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 560, which means that the memory performance of the R9 270X is massively better than the GTX 560.

The Radeon R9 270X Crossfire has 2560 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 560 SLI has 672. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 270X is 2285 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 560 is 1089. The R9 270X having 1196 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 560.

The R9 270X transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 560. This means that the R9 270X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 560.

The Radeon R9 270X Crossfire requires 360 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 560 SLI requires 300 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the R9 270X and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 560. The R9 270X requires 60 Watts more than the GTX 560 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 560.