In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Z EVGA Superclocked 12GB Edition are significantly better than the AMD Radeon R9 280X Crossfire.

The R9 280X has a 115 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX Titan, but the GTX Titan has 224 more Texture Mapping Units than the R9 280X. As a result, the GTX Titan exhibits a 135.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the R9 280X. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R9 280X has a 115 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX Titan, but the GTX Titan has 32 more Render Output Units than the R9 280X. As a result, the GTX Titan exhibits a 16.2 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R9 280X. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX Titan 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 GTX Titan has 6144 MB more video memory than the R9 280X, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX Titan also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX Titan has 96 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R9 280X, which means that the memory performance of the GTX Titan is massively better than the R9 280X.

The GeForce GTX Titan Z EVGA Superclocked 12GB Edition has 5760 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire has 4096. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX Titan is 5270. The GTX Titan having 1174 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX Titan delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the R9 280X.

The GeForce GTX Titan Z EVGA Superclocked 12GB Edition requires 375 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire requires 550 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 700 Watts for the GTX Titan and a PSU with at least 1000 Watts for the R9 280X. The R9 280X requires 175 Watts more than the GTX Titan to run. The difference is significant enough that the R9 280X may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX Titan.