In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 EVGA FTW ACX 2.0 4GB Edition are very slightly better than the AMD Radeon R9 280X Crossfire.

The GTX 980 has a 429 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X, but the R9 280X has 128 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 980. As a result, the R9 280X exhibits a 53.9 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 980. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 980 has a 429 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 980 providing 27.5 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 980 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 R9 280X has 2048 MB more video memory than the GTX 980, 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 351.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 980, which means that the memory performance of the R9 280X is massively better than the GTX 980.

The GeForce GTX 980 EVGA FTW ACX 2.0 4GB Edition has 2048 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire has 4096. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 980 is 3815. The R9 280X having 281 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 980.

The GeForce GTX 980 EVGA FTW ACX 2.0 4GB Edition requires 165 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire requires 550 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the GTX 980 and a PSU with at least 1000 Watts for the R9 280X. The R9 280X requires 385 Watts more than the GTX 980 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 980.