In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 280X Crossfire are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 EVGA Superclocked 2GB Edition.

The GTX 960 has a 366 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X, but the R9 280X has 192 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 960. As a result, the R9 280X exhibits a 139.8 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 960. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 960 has a 366 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X, but the R9 280X has 32 more Render Output Units than the GTX 960. As a result, the R9 280X exhibits a 15.5 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 960. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 960 was released over a year more recently than the R9 280X, and so the GTX 960 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the R9 280X.

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 4096 MB more video memory than the GTX 960, 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 463.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 960, which means that the memory performance of the R9 280X is massively better than the GTX 960.

The GeForce GTX 960 EVGA Superclocked 2GB Edition has 1024 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire has 4096. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 960 is 1768. The R9 280X having 2328 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 GTX 960.

The GeForce GTX 960 EVGA Superclocked 2GB Edition requires 120 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire requires 550 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the GTX 960 and a PSU with at least 1000 Watts for the R9 280X. The R9 280X requires 430 Watts more than the GTX 960 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 960.