In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 SLI are massively better than the AMD Radeon HD 5670 1024MB.

The HD 5670 has a 100 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 92 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 5670. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 60.1 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 5670. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 5670 has a 100 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 56 more Render Output Units than the HD 5670. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 37 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 5670. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 460 was released less than a year after the HD 5670, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GTX 460 has 1024 MB more video memory than the HD 5670, 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 166.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 5670, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 460 is massively better than the HD 5670.

The GeForce GTX 460 SLI has 672 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5670 1024MB has 400. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 907 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5670 is 155. The GTX 460 having 752 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 5670.

The GeForce GTX 460 SLI requires 380 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 5670 1024MB requires 64 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 460 and a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the HD 5670. The GTX 460 requires 316 Watts more than the HD 5670 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 5670.