In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7850 are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 768MB.
The Radeon HD 7850 has a 185 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 460. This results in the Radeon HD 7850 providing 17.2 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 Radeon HD 7850 has a 185 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon HD 7850 providing 5.9 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 Radeon HD 7850 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 460, and so the Radeon HD 7850 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games.
The Radeon HD 7850 has 1280 MB more video memory than the GTX 460, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the Radeon HD 7850 also has superior memory performance overall.
The Radeon HD 7850 has 67.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 460, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 7850 is much better than the GTX 460.
The Radeon HD 7850 has 1024 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 460 768MB has 336. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 7850 is 793 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 454. The Radeon HD 7850 having 339 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon HD 7850 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 460.
The Radeon HD 7850 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 460. This means that the Radeon HD 7850 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 460.
The Radeon HD 7850 requires 130 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 460 768MB requires 150 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the Radeon HD 7850 and a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the GTX 460. The GTX 460 requires 20 Watts more than the Radeon HD 7850 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GTX 460 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon HD 7850.