In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX 590 Sapphire Nitro+ AMD 50 Gold Edition 8GB are very slightly better than the AMD Radeon R9 280X Crossfire.

The RX 590 has a 619 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X, but the R9 280X has 112 more Texture Mapping Units than the RX 590. As a result, the R9 280X exhibits a 6.1 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the RX 590. 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 619 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X, but the R9 280X has 32 more Render Output Units than the RX 590. As a result, the R9 280X exhibits a 7.4 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the RX 590. 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 R9 280X, 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 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 RX 590 has 2048 MB more video memory than the R9 280X, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The R9 280X has 307.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the RX 590, which means that the memory performance of the R9 280X is massively better than the RX 590.

The Radeon RX 590 Sapphire Nitro+ AMD 50 Gold Edition 8GB has 2304 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire has 4096. However, the actual shader performance of the RX 590 is 3594. The R9 280X having 502 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 RX 590.

The RX 590 transistor size technology is 16 nm (nanometers) smaller than the R9 280X. This means that the RX 590 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the R9 280X.

The Radeon RX 590 Sapphire Nitro+ AMD 50 Gold Edition 8GB requires 235 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 280X Crossfire requires 550 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the RX 590 and a PSU with at least 1000 Watts for the R9 280X. The R9 280X requires 315 Watts more than the RX 590 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 RX 590.