In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 390 Crossfire are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition.

The GTX 680 has a 110 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 390, but the R9 390 has 192 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 680. As a result, the R9 390 exhibits a 177.9 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 110 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 390, but the R9 390 has 96 more Render Output Units than the GTX 680. As a result, the R9 390 exhibits a 92.5 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 R9 390 was released over three years more recently than the GTX 680, and so the R9 390 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GTX 680 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 R9 390 has 12288 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 R9 390 also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 390 has 575.7 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 680, which means that the memory performance of the R9 390 is massively better than the GTX 680.

The Radeon R9 390 Crossfire has 5120 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition has 1536. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 390 is 4352 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 680 is 1806. The R9 390 having 2546 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 390 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 680.

The Radeon R9 390 Crossfire requires 550 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition requires 195 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 850 Watts for the R9 390 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 680. The R9 390 requires 355 Watts more than the GTX 680 to run. The difference is significant enough that the R9 390 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 680.