In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 270X Crossfire are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580.

The R9 270X has a 228 MHz higher core clock speed and 96 more Texture Mapping Units than the GeForce GTX 580. This results in the R9 270X providing 110.6 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 228 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Render Output Units than the GeForce GTX 580. This results in the R9 270X providing 26.9 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 GeForce GTX 580, 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 GeForce GTX 580.

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 2560 MB more video memory than the GeForce GTX 580, 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 166 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce GTX 580, which means that the memory performance of the R9 270X is massively better than the GeForce GTX 580.

The Radeon R9 270X Crossfire has 2560 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 580 has 512. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 270X is 2285 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 580 is 791. The R9 270X having 1494 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 GeForce GTX 580.

The R9 270X transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce GTX 580. This means that the R9 270X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce GTX 580.

The Radeon R9 270X Crossfire requires 360 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 580 requires 244 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 GeForce GTX 580. The R9 270X requires 116 Watts more than the GeForce GTX 580 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 GeForce GTX 580.