In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 270X Crossfire are significantly better than the AMD Radeon R9 270 MSI Gaming 2GB Edition.

The R9 270X has a 100 MHz higher core clock speed and 80 more Texture Mapping Units than the R9 270. This results in the R9 270X providing 88 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 100 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Render Output Units than the R9 270. This results in the R9 270X providing 35.2 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 270 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 R9 270X has 2048 MB more video memory than the R9 270, 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 179.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R9 270, which means that the memory performance of the R9 270X is massively better than the R9 270.

The Radeon R9 270X Crossfire has 2560 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 270 MSI Gaming 2GB Edition has 1280. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 270X is 2285 and the actual shader performance of the R9 270 is 1061. The R9 270X having 1224 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 R9 270.

The Radeon R9 270X Crossfire requires 360 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 270 MSI Gaming 2GB Edition requires 175 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 R9 270. The R9 270X requires 185 Watts more than the R9 270 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 R9 270.