In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition are significantly better than the AMD FirePro D300.

The GTX 680 has a 335 MHz higher core clock speed and 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the FirePro D300. This results in the GTX 680 providing 80.1 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 GTX 680 has a 335 MHz higher core clock speed than the FirePro D300 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 680 providing 10.7 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 FirePro D300 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 680, and so the FirePro D300 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 680.

The GTX 680 has 2048 MB more video memory than the FirePro D300, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 680 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 680 has 32.3 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the FirePro D300, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 680 is noticeably better than the FirePro D300.

The FirePro D300 has 1280 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition has 1536. However, the actual shader performance of the FirePro D300 is 645 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 680 is 1806. The GTX 680 having 1161 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 680 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the FirePro D300.

The FirePro D300 requires 150 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition requires 195 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the FirePro D300 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 680. The GTX 680 requires 45 Watts more than the FirePro D300 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 680 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the FirePro D300.