In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti MSI 6GB Edition are very slightly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti EVGA Classified Kingpin Edition.

The GTX 780 Ti has a 72 MHz higher core clock speed and 64 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 980 Ti. This results in the GTX 780 Ti providing 81.3 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 780 Ti has a 72 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 980 Ti, but the GTX 980 Ti has 48 more Render Output Units than the GTX 780 Ti. As a result, the GTX 980 Ti exhibits a 44.5 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 780 Ti. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 980 Ti was released over a year more recently than the GTX 780 Ti, and so the GTX 980 Ti is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 780 Ti.

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 Ti has 3072 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 Ti also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 980 Ti has 0.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 780 Ti, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 980 Ti is marginally better than the GTX 780 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti MSI 6GB Edition has 2816 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 780 Ti EVGA Classified Kingpin Edition has 2880. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 980 Ti is 4091 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 780 Ti is 3275. The GTX 980 Ti having 816 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 980 Ti delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 780 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti MSI 6GB Edition requires 250 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 Ti and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 780 Ti. The two GPUs require the same amount of wattage to run. As such, there is no need to worry about which will more significantly affect your yearly electricity bills.