In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX 480 PowerColor Red Dragon 4GB are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780.

The RX 480 has a 257 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 780, but the GeForce GTX 780 has 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the RX 480. As a result, the GeForce GTX 780 exhibits a 4.4 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the RX 480. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The RX 480 has a 257 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 780, but the GeForce GTX 780 has 16 more Render Output Units than the RX 480. As a result, the GeForce GTX 780 exhibits a 5.6 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the RX 480. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The RX 480 was released over three years more recently than the GeForce GTX 780, and so the RX 480 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GeForce GTX 780 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 RX 480 has 1024 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 RX 480 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GeForce GTX 780 has 64.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the RX 480, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce GTX 780 is much better than the RX 480.

Both the Radeon RX 480 PowerColor Red Dragon 4GB and the GeForce GTX 780 have 2304 Shader Processing Units. While the two GPUs have the same number of SPUs, the actual performance delivered by the RX 480 is 2917 and by the GeForce GTX 780 is 2078. Knowing that the shader performance of the RX 480 is superior, it is not necessary to examine the GPUs' respective Texture and Pixel Fill Rates.

The RX 480 transistor size technology is 14 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce GTX 780. This means that the RX 480 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce GTX 780.

The Radeon RX 480 PowerColor Red Dragon 4GB requires 120 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 780 requires 250 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the RX 480 and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GeForce GTX 780. The GeForce GTX 780 requires 130 Watts more than the RX 480 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GeForce GTX 780 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the RX 480.