In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 MSI Gaming 4GB Edition SLI are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti EVGA Classified Kingpin Edition.

The GTX 980 has a 144 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 780 Ti. This results in the GTX 980 providing 54 GTexel/s better texturing performance. 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 144 MHz higher core clock speed and 80 more Render Output Units than the GTX 780 Ti. This results in the GTX 980 providing 104.1 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 GTX 780 Ti, 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 GTX 980 has 5120 MB more video memory than the GTX 780 Ti, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 980 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 980 has 112.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 780 Ti, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 980 is massively better than the GTX 780 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 980 MSI Gaming 4GB Edition SLI has 4096 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 780 Ti EVGA Classified Kingpin Edition has 2880. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 980 is 7282 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 780 Ti is 3275. The GTX 980 having 4007 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 980 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 780 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 980 MSI Gaming 4GB Edition SLI requires 340 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 780 Ti EVGA Classified Kingpin Edition requires 250 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 980 and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 780 Ti. The GTX 980 requires 90 Watts more than the GTX 780 Ti to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 980 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 780 Ti.