In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7950 Boost Edition Crossfire are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition.

The GTX 680 has a 260 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 7950, but the HD 7950 has 96 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 680. As a result, the HD 7950 exhibits a 48.3 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 260 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 7950, but the HD 7950 has 32 more Render Output Units than the GTX 680. As a result, the HD 7950 exhibits a 18.9 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 HD 7950 was released less than a year after the GTX 680, 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 HD 7950 has 2048 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 HD 7950 also has superior memory performance overall.

The HD 7950 has 287.7 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 680, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7950 is massively better than the GTX 680.

The Radeon HD 7950 Boost Edition Crossfire has 3584 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition has 1536. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7950 is 2818 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 680 is 1806. The HD 7950 having 1012 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 7950 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 HD 7950. We would recommend a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 680, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the HD 7950.