In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX 590 PowerColor Red Devil 8GB are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition.

The RX 590 has a 359 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 680. This results in the RX 590 providing 69.4 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 RX 590 has a 359 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 680 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the RX 590 providing 11.5 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 590 was released over three years more recently than the GTX 680, and so the RX 590 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 RX 590 has 4096 MB more video memory than the GTX 680, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the RX 590 also has superior memory performance overall.

The RX 590 has 63.7 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 680, which means that the memory performance of the RX 590 is much better than the GTX 680.

The Radeon RX 590 PowerColor Red Devil 8GB has 2304 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition has 1536. However, the actual shader performance of the RX 590 is 3631 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 680 is 1806. The RX 590 having 1825 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the RX 590 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 680.

The RX 590 transistor size technology is 16 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 680. This means that the RX 590 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 680.

The Radeon RX 590 PowerColor Red Devil 8GB requires 175 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 680 Galaxy Edition requires 195 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the RX 590 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 680. The GTX 680 requires 20 Watts more than the RX 590 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GTX 680 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the RX 590.