GeForce GTX 460 2GB vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 260X, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 1100 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1625 MHz on this particular card. It features 896 SPUs as well as 56 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 260X		115 Watts
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		160 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (39%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 460 2GB should perform just a bit faster than the Radeon R7 260X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 2GB		115200 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 11200 (11%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X should be much (more or less 63%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 460 2GB. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 2GB		37800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23800 (63%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 460 2GB is superior to the Radeon R7 260X, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 2GB		21600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (23%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.