In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 Asus Turbo OC 4GB Edition SLI are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon R9 270X Crossfire.

The GTX 960 has a 253 MHz higher core clock speed but 32 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the R9 270X. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the GTX 960 manages to provide 0.40000000000001 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 960 has a 253 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 270X and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 960 providing 16.2 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 960 was released over a year more recently than the R9 270X, and so the GTX 960 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 960 has 4096 MB more video memory than the R9 270X, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The R9 270X has 134 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 960, which means that the memory performance of the R9 270X is massively better than the GTX 960.

The GeForce GTX 960 Asus Turbo OC 4GB Edition SLI has 2048 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 270X Crossfire has 2560. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 960 is 3641 and the actual shader performance of the R9 270X is 2285. The GTX 960 having 1356 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the R9 270X performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GeForce GTX 960 Asus Turbo OC 4GB Edition SLI requires 300 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 960 and a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the R9 270X. The R9 270X requires 60 Watts more than the GTX 960 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 960.