In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 270X MSI Gaming 4GB Edition Crossfire are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition.

The GTX 680 has a 80 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 270X, but the R9 270X has 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 680. As a result, the R9 270X exhibits a 22.7 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 680. 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 80 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 270X, but the R9 270X has 32 more Render Output Units than the GTX 680. As a result, the R9 270X exhibits a 30.4 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 680. 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 GTX 680, 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 GTX 680.

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 4096 MB more video memory than the GTX 680, 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 166.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 680, which means that the memory performance of the R9 270X is massively better than the GTX 680.

The Radeon R9 270X MSI Gaming 4GB Edition Crossfire has 2560 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition has 1536. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 270X is 2437 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 680 is 1806. The R9 270X having 631 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 GTX 680.

The GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition requires 195 Watts to run but there is no entry for the R9 270X. We would recommend a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the R9 270X and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 680. The R9 270X has been recommended a PSU with 200 Watts more than the GTX 680. The difference is significant enough that the R9 270X may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 680.