In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti Gigabyte XTREME 6GB Edition are significantly better than the AMD Radeon R9 270X Crossfire.

The GTX 980 Ti has a 216 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the R9 270X. This results in the GTX 980 Ti providing 54 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 216 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Render Output Units than the R9 270X. This results in the GTX 980 Ti providing 52.7 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 R9 270X, 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 R9 270X.

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 2048 MB more video memory than the R9 270X, 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 R9 270X has 12.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 980 Ti, which means that the memory performance of the R9 270X is slightly better than the GTX 980 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti Gigabyte XTREME 6GB Edition has 2816 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 270X Crossfire has 2560. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 980 Ti is 5007 and the actual shader performance of the R9 270X is 2285. The GTX 980 Ti having 2722 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 R9 270X.

The GeForce GTX 980 Ti Gigabyte XTREME 6GB Edition requires 250 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 270X Crossfire requires 360 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 980 Ti and a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the R9 270X. The R9 270X requires 110 Watts more than the GTX 980 Ti to run. The difference is significant enough that the R9 270X may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 980 Ti.