In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 SLI are massively better than the AMD Radeon HD 3850 X2.

The GTX 460 has a 6 MHz higher core clock speed and 80 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 3850. This results in the GTX 460 providing 54.2 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 6 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Render Output Units than the HD 3850. This results in the GTX 460 providing 21.8 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 460 was released over a year more recently than the HD 3850, and so the GTX 460 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 3850.

The GTX 460 has 1024 MB more video memory than the HD 3850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 460 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 460 has 124.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 3850, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 460 is massively better than the HD 3850.

The GeForce GTX 460 SLI has 672 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 3850 X2 has 640. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 907 and the actual shader performance of the HD 3850 is 428. The GTX 460 having 479 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 460 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 3850.

The GTX 460 transistor size technology is 15 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 3850. This means that the GTX 460 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 3850.

The GeForce GTX 460 SLI requires 380 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 3850 X2 requires 140 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 460 and a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the HD 3850. The GTX 460 requires 240 Watts more than the HD 3850 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 HD 3850.