GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 vs GeForce GTX 460 2GB

Intro

The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 makes use of a 65 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 576 MHz. The GDDR3 memory runs at a speed of 999 MHz on this card. It features 216 SPUs as well as 72 TAUs and 28 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 460 2GB, which has core speeds of 675 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 336 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

GeForce GTX 460 2GB Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 260 Core 216	GeForce GTX 460 2GB
Manufacturer	nVidia	nVidia
Year	September 16, 2008	July 2010
Code Name	G200	GF104
Fab Process	65 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16 2.0	PCIe x16
Memory	896 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	576 MHz	675 MHz
Shader Speed	1242 MHz	1350 MHz
Memory Speed	999 MHz	900 MHz
Unified Shaders	216	336
Texture Mapping Units	72	56
Render Output Units	28	32
Bus Type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Bus Width	448-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.1	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	202 watts	160 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	111888 MB/sec	115200 MB/sec
Texel Rate	41472 Mtexels/sec	37800 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	16128 Mpixels/sec	21600 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.