In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 280X Sapphire Vapor-X 3GB OC Edition Crossfire are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon R9 270X Crossfire.

The R9 270X has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X, but the R9 280X has 96 more Texture Mapping Units than the R9 270X. As a result, the R9 280X exhibits a 83.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the R9 270X. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R9 270X has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the R9 270X providing 3.2 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

Both the Radeon R9 280X Sapphire Vapor-X 3GB OC Edition Crossfire and the Radeon R9 270X Crossfire were released at the same time, so are likely to be quite similar.

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 280X has 2048 MB more video memory than the R9 270X, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R9 280X also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 280X has 236.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R9 270X, which means that the memory performance of the R9 280X is massively better than the R9 270X.

The Radeon R9 280X Sapphire Vapor-X 3GB OC Edition Crossfire has 4096 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 270X Crossfire has 2560. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 280X is 4383 and the actual shader performance of the R9 270X is 2285. The R9 280X having 2098 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 280X delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the R9 270X.

The Radeon R9 280X Sapphire Vapor-X 3GB OC Edition Crossfire requires 500 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 270X Crossfire requires 360 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the R9 270X, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the R9 280X. The R9 280X requires 140 Watts more than the R9 270X 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 R9 270X.