In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD FirePro W9000 are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 SLI.

The FirePro W9000 has a 300 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 460. This results in the FirePro W9000 providing 49.2 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 FirePro W9000 has a 300 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 32 more Render Output Units than the FirePro W9000. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 12 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the FirePro W9000. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The FirePro W9000 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 460, and so the FirePro W9000 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 460.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The FirePro W9000 has 4096 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 FirePro W9000 also has superior memory performance overall.

The FirePro W9000 has 33.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 460, which means that the memory performance of the FirePro W9000 is noticeably better than the GTX 460.

The GeForce GTX 460 SLI has 672 Shader Processing Units and the FirePro W9000 has 2048. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 907 and the actual shader performance of the FirePro W9000 is 1298. The FirePro W9000 having 391 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the FirePro W9000 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 460.

The FirePro W9000 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 460. This means that the FirePro W9000 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 460. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the FirePro W9000 should consume less power than the GTX 460.

The GeForce GTX 460 SLI requires 380 Watts to run and the FirePro W9000 requires 274 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 460 and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the FirePro W9000. The GTX 460 requires 106 Watts more than the FirePro W9000 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 460 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the FirePro W9000.