In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 290X Crossfire are very slightly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti EVGA Classified Kingpin Edition.

The GTX 780 Ti has a 72 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 290X, but the R9 290X has 112 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 780 Ti. As a result, the R9 290X exhibits a 94.7 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 780 Ti. 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 than the R9 290X, but the R9 290X has 80 more Render Output Units than the GTX 780 Ti. As a result, the R9 290X exhibits a 76.5 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 780 Ti. 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 290X, 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 290X has 5120 MB more video memory than the GTX 780 Ti, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R9 290X also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 290X has 304 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 780 Ti, which means that the memory performance of the R9 290X is massively better than the GTX 780 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti EVGA Classified Kingpin Edition has 2880 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 290X Crossfire has 5632. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 780 Ti is 3275 and the actual shader performance of the R9 290X is 4787. The R9 290X having 1512 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 290X delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 780 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti EVGA Classified Kingpin Edition requires 250 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 290X Crossfire requires 500 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 780 Ti and a PSU with at least 1250 Watts for the R9 290X. The R9 290X requires 250 Watts more than the GTX 780 Ti to run. The difference is significant enough that the R9 290X may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 780 Ti.