In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Zotac Gaming Amp 6GB are very slightly better than the AMD Radeon R9 280X Crossfire.

The GTX 1660 has a 680 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X, but the R9 280X has 168 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 1660. As a result, the R9 280X exhibits a 83 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 1660. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 1660 has a 680 MHz higher core clock speed but 16 fewer Render Output Units than the R9 280X. The lower ROP count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the GTX 1660 manages to provide 19 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 1660 was released over three years more recently than the R9 280X, and so the GTX 1660 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the R9 280X 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 GeForce GTX 1660 Zotac Gaming Amp 6GB and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The R9 280X has 383.9 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 1660, which means that the memory performance of the R9 280X is massively better than the GTX 1660.

The GeForce GTX 1660 Zotac Gaming Amp 6GB has 1408 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire has 4096. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 1660 is 2598. The R9 280X having 1498 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 1660.

The GTX 1660 transistor size technology is 16 nm (nanometers) smaller than the R9 280X. This means that the GTX 1660 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the R9 280X.

The GeForce GTX 1660 Zotac Gaming Amp 6GB requires 130 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire requires 550 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the GTX 1660 and a PSU with at least 1000 Watts for the R9 280X. The R9 280X requires 420 Watts more than the GTX 1660 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 1660.