In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme Edition are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 SLI.

The GTX 580 has a 157 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 580. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 22.4 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 580. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 580 has a 157 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 16 more Render Output Units than the GTX 580. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 3.3 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 580. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 580 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.

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 GTX 580 has 1024 MB more video memory than the GTX 460, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The GTX 460 has 28.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 580, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 460 is slightly better than the GTX 580.

The GeForce GTX 460 SLI has 672 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme Edition has 512. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 907 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 580 is 852. The GTX 460 having 55 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 460 delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 580.

The GeForce GTX 460 SLI requires 380 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme Edition requires 244 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 GTX 580. The GTX 460 requires 136 Watts more than the GTX 580 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 GTX 580.