In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti MSI Sea Hawk 6GB Edition are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780.

The GTX 980 Ti has a 327 MHz higher core clock speed but 16 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the GeForce GTX 780. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the GTX 980 Ti manages to provide 43.7 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 Ti has a 327 MHz higher core clock speed and 48 more Render Output Units than the GeForce GTX 780. This results in the GTX 980 Ti providing 72.8 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 980 Ti was released over a year more recently than the GeForce GTX 780, 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 GeForce GTX 780.

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 GeForce GTX 780, 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 52.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce GTX 780, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 980 Ti is much better than the GeForce GTX 780.

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti MSI Sea Hawk 6GB Edition has 2816 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 780 has 2304. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 980 Ti is 4908 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 780 is 2078. The GTX 980 Ti having 2830 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 980 Ti delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GeForce GTX 780.

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti MSI Sea Hawk 6GB Edition requires 250 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 780 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 GeForce GTX 780. 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.