In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 EVGA FTW+ ACX 2.0+ 4GB Edition SLI are significantly better than the AMD Radeon R9 280X Crossfire.

The GTX 970 has a 366 MHz higher core clock speed but 48 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the R9 280X. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the GTX 970 manages to provide 35.3 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 970 has a 366 MHz higher core clock speed and 48 more Render Output Units than the R9 280X. This results in the GTX 970 providing 81.8 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 970 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 GTX 970 has 2048 MB more video memory than the R9 280X, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 970 also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 280X has 127.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 970, which means that the memory performance of the R9 280X is massively better than the GTX 970.

The GeForce GTX 970 EVGA FTW+ ACX 2.0+ 4GB Edition SLI has 3328 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire has 4096. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 970 is 6142. The GTX 970 having 2046 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 970 delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the R9 280X.

The GeForce GTX 970 EVGA FTW+ ACX 2.0+ 4GB Edition SLI requires 300 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire requires 550 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 970 and a PSU with at least 1000 Watts for the R9 280X. The R9 280X requires 250 Watts more than the GTX 970 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 970.