In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti EVGA Classified Kingpin Edition are significantly better than the AMD Radeon R9 280X MSI Gaming 3GB Edition.

The GTX 780 Ti has a 72 MHz higher core clock speed and 112 more Texture Mapping Units than the R9 280X. This results in the GTX 780 Ti providing 129.3 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 GTX 780 Ti has a 72 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Render Output Units than the R9 280X. This results in the GTX 780 Ti providing 19.5 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 GTX 780 Ti was released less than a year after the R9 280X, 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 GeForce GTX 780 Ti EVGA Classified Kingpin Edition and the Radeon R9 280X MSI Gaming 3GB Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GTX 780 Ti has 48 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R9 280X, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 780 Ti is noticeably better than the R9 280X.

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti EVGA Classified Kingpin Edition has 2880 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 280X MSI Gaming 3GB Edition has 2048. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 780 Ti is 3275 and the actual shader performance of the R9 280X is 1828. The GTX 780 Ti having 1447 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 780 Ti delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the R9 280X.

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti EVGA Classified Kingpin Edition requires 250 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 280X MSI Gaming 3GB Edition requires 250 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 780 Ti and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the R9 280X. The two GPUs require the same amount of wattage to run. As such, there is no need to worry about which will more significantly affect your yearly electricity bills.