In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 280X Crossfire are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 EVGA SSC Gaming ACX 3.0 2GB.

The GTX 1050 has a 580 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X, but the R9 280X has 216 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 1050. As a result, the R9 280X exhibits a 160.4 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 1050. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 1050 has a 580 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X, but the R9 280X has 32 more Render Output Units than the GTX 1050. As a result, the R9 280X exhibits a 8.6 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 1050. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R9 280X was released over three years more recently than the GTX 1050, and so the R9 280X is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GTX 1050 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 R9 280X has 4096 MB more video memory than the GTX 1050, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R9 280X also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 280X has 463.9 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 1050, which means that the memory performance of the R9 280X is massively better than the GTX 1050.

The GeForce GTX 1050 EVGA SSC Gaming ACX 3.0 2GB has 640 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire has 4096. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 1050 is 1334. The R9 280X having 2762 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 280X delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 1050.

The GTX 1050 transistor size technology is 14 nm (nanometers) smaller than the R9 280X. This means that the GTX 1050 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the R9 280X.

The GeForce GTX 1050 EVGA SSC Gaming ACX 3.0 2GB requires 75 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire requires 550 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the GTX 1050 and a PSU with at least 1000 Watts for the R9 280X. The R9 280X requires 475 Watts more than the GTX 1050 to run. The difference is significant enough that the R9 280X may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 1050.