In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 380 Crossfire are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon R9 270X Crossfire.

The R9 270X has a 30 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 380, but the R9 380 has 64 more Texture Mapping Units than the R9 270X. As a result, the R9 380 exhibits a 57.3 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 30 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 380 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the R9 270X providing 1.9 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 R9 380 was released over a year more recently than the R9 270X, and so the R9 380 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the R9 270X.

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 Radeon R9 380 Crossfire and the Radeon R9 270X Crossfire have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The R9 270X has 6.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R9 380, which means that the memory performance of the R9 270X is marginally better than the R9 380.

The Radeon R9 380 Crossfire has 3584 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 270X Crossfire has 2560. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 380 is 2955 and the actual shader performance of the R9 270X is 2285. The R9 380 having 670 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 380 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the R9 270X.

The Radeon R9 380 Crossfire requires 400 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 380 and a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the R9 270X. The R9 380 requires 40 Watts more than the R9 270X to run. The difference is significant enough that the R9 380 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R9 270X.