In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti DirectCUII TOP 2GB are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition.

The GTX 560 Ti has a 135 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 460. This results in the GTX 560 Ti providing 14.8 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 560 Ti has a 135 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 560 Ti providing 4.3 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 GTX 560 Ti was released less than a year after the GTX 460, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GTX 560 Ti has 1024 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 GTX 560 Ti also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 560 Ti has 9.9 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 460, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 560 Ti is marginally better than the GTX 460.

The GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition has 336 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 560 Ti DirectCUII TOP 2GB has 384. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 514 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 560 Ti is 691. The GTX 560 Ti having 177 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 560 Ti delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 460.

We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the GTX 460.