In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon HD 6790 IceQ X Turbo 1GB Edition.

The HD 6790 has a 135 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 6790. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 6.8 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 6790. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 6790 has a 135 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 16 more Render Output Units than the HD 6790. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 10.1 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 6790. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD 6790 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 Radeon HD 6790 IceQ X Turbo 1GB Edition and the GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The HD 6790 has 22.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 460, which means that the memory performance of the HD 6790 is slightly better than the GTX 460.

The Radeon HD 6790 IceQ X Turbo 1GB Edition has 800 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition has 336. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 6790 is 360 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 514. The GTX 460 having 154 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 460 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 6790.

We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6790 and a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the GTX 460. The HD 6790 has been recommended a PSU with 50 Watts more than the GTX 460. The difference is significant enough that the HD 6790 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 460.