GeForce GTX 460 SE vs Radeon R7 260X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R7 260X, which comes with a clock frequency of 1100 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1625 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 896 SPUs, 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 SE		150 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 460 SE should theoretically perform a little bit faster than the Radeon R7 260X overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		108800 MB/sec
Radeon R7 260X		104000 MB/sec
	Difference: 4800 (5%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 260X should be a lot (more or less 97%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 460 SE. (explain)

Radeon R7 260X		61600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 460 SE		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 30400 (97%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 460 SE will be a small bit (about 18%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the Radeon R7 260X, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 460 SE		20800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon R7 260X		17600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3200 (18%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.