In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti are significantly better than the AMD Radeon RX 590 8GB.

The GTX 1080 Ti has a 11 MHz higher core clock speed and 80 more Texture Mapping Units than the RX 590. This results in the GTX 1080 Ti providing 120 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 GTX 1080 Ti has a 11 MHz higher core clock speed and 56 more Render Output Units than the RX 590. This results in the GTX 1080 Ti providing 83.2 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 a year more recently than the GTX 1080 Ti, and so the RX 590 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 1080 Ti.

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 GTX 1080 Ti has 3072 MB more video memory than the RX 590, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 1080 Ti also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 1080 Ti has 228.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the RX 590, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 1080 Ti is massively better than the RX 590.

The Radeon RX 590 8GB has 2304 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti has 3584. However, the actual shader performance of the RX 590 is 3560 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 1080 Ti is 7654. The GTX 1080 Ti having 4094 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 1080 Ti delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the RX 590.

The RX 590 transistor size technology is 4 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 1080 Ti. This means that the RX 590 is expected to run very slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 1080 Ti.

The Radeon RX 590 8GB requires 175 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti requires 220 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the RX 590 and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 1080 Ti. The GTX 1080 Ti requires 45 Watts more than the RX 590 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 1080 Ti may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the RX 590.