In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition are massively better than the AMD Radeon R7 260X v2 MSI OC v2 2GB Edition.

The R7 260X has a 65 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 680, but the GTX 680 has 72 more Texture Mapping Units than the R7 260X. As a result, the GTX 680 exhibits a 76.3 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the R7 260X. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R7 260X has a 65 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 680, but the GTX 680 has 16 more Render Output Units than the R7 260X. As a result, the GTX 680 exhibits a 16.7 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 260X. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 260X was released over a year more recently than the GTX 680, and so the R7 260X is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 680.

The GTX 680 has 2048 MB more video memory than the R7 260X, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 680 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 680 has 96.3 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 260X, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 680 is massively better than the R7 260X.

The Radeon R7 260X v2 MSI OC v2 2GB Edition has 896 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition has 1536. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 260X is 895 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 680 is 1806. The GTX 680 having 911 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 680 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the R7 260X.

The Radeon R7 260X v2 MSI OC v2 2GB Edition requires 105 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition requires 195 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the R7 260X and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 680. The GTX 680 requires 90 Watts more than the R7 260X to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 680 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 260X.