In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 are significantly better than the AMD Radeon R9 280X Crossfire.

The GeForce GTX 1080 has a 757 MHz higher core clock speed but 96 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the R9 280X. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the GeForce GTX 1080 manages to provide 39.5 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 GeForce GTX 1080 has a 757 MHz higher core clock speed than the R9 280X and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GeForce GTX 1080 providing 48.4 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 GeForce GTX 1080 was released over a year more recently than the R9 280X, and so the GeForce GTX 1080 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the R9 280X.

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 1080 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, overall, the R9 280X has superior memory performance.

The R9 280X has 255.7 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce GTX 1080, which means that the memory performance of the R9 280X is massively better than the GeForce GTX 1080.

The Radeon R9 280X Crossfire has 4096 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 1080 has 2560. However, the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 1080 is 5989. The GeForce GTX 1080 having 1893 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the R9 280X performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GeForce GTX 1080 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the R9 280X. This means that the GeForce GTX 1080 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the R9 280X.

The Radeon R9 280X Crossfire requires 550 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 1080 requires 180 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 1000 Watts for the R9 280X and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the GeForce GTX 1080. The R9 280X requires 370 Watts more than the GeForce GTX 1080 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 GeForce GTX 1080.