In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition are noticeably better than the Nvidia Quadro 5000.

The GTX 460 has a 252 MHz higher core clock speed and 12 more Texture Mapping Units than the Quadro 5000. This results in the GTX 460 providing 20.2 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 GTX 460 has a 252 MHz higher core clock speed but 8 fewer Render Output Units than the Quadro 5000. The lower ROP count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the GTX 460 manages to provide 4 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 Quadro 5000 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 Quadro 5000 has 1536 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 Quadro 5000 also has superior memory performance overall.

The Quadro 5000 has 1.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 460, which means that the memory performance of the Quadro 5000 is marginally better than the GTX 460.

The GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition has 336 Shader Processing Units and the Quadro 5000 has 352. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 514 and the actual shader performance of the Quadro 5000 is 361. The GTX 460 having 153 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 460 delivers a slightly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Quadro 5000.

The Quadro 5000 requires 152 Watts to run but there is no entry for the GTX 460. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the GTX 460 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the Quadro 5000. The Quadro 5000 has been recommended a PSU with 50 Watts more than the GTX 460. The difference is significant enough that the Quadro 5000 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 460.