In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX 470 XFX RS Black Limited Edition 4GB are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition.

The GTX 680 has a 184 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the RX 470. This results in the GTX 680 providing 23.6 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 680 has a 184 MHz higher core clock speed than the RX 470 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 680 providing 5.9 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 RX 470 was released over three years more recently than the GTX 680, and so the RX 470 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 Radeon RX 470 XFX RS Black Limited Edition 4GB and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The RX 470 has 31.7 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 680, which means that the memory performance of the RX 470 is noticeably better than the GTX 680.

The Radeon RX 470 XFX RS Black Limited Edition 4GB has 2048 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition has 1536. However, the actual shader performance of the RX 470 is 2621 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 680 is 1806. The RX 470 having 815 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the RX 470 delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 680.

The RX 470 transistor size technology is 14 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 680. This means that the RX 470 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 680.

The Radeon RX 470 XFX RS Black Limited Edition 4GB requires 120 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition requires 195 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the RX 470 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 680. The GTX 680 requires 75 Watts more than the RX 470 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 RX 470.