In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7870 Double D Black Edition are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 SLI.

The HD 7870 has a 375 MHz higher core clock speed but 32 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 460. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the HD 7870 manages to provide 8.4 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 HD 7870 has a 375 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 32 more Render Output Units than the HD 7870. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 9.6 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 7870. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD 7870 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 460, and so the HD 7870 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 GeForce GTX 460 SLI and the Radeon HD 7870 Double D Black Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GTX 460 has 70.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7870, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 460 is much better than the HD 7870.

The GeForce GTX 460 SLI has 672 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7870 Double D Black Edition has 1280. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 907 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7870 is 1142. The HD 7870 having 235 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GTX 460 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The HD 7870 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 460. This means that the HD 7870 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 460. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the HD 7870 should consume less power than the GTX 460.

The GeForce GTX 460 SLI requires 380 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 7870 Double D Black Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 460 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 7870. The GTX 460 has been recommended a PSU with 100 Watts more than the HD 7870. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 460 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 7870.