In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia Quadro Plex 7000 are very slightly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 SLI.

The GTX 460 has a 101 MHz higher core clock speed but 16 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the Quadro Plex 7000. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the GTX 460 manages to provide 2.1 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 101 MHz higher core clock speed than the Quadro Plex 7000, but the Quadro Plex 7000 has 32 more Render Output Units than the GTX 460. As a result, the Quadro Plex 7000 exhibits a 11.9 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 460. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Quadro Plex 7000 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 460, and so the Quadro Plex 7000 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 Quadro Plex 7000 has 10240 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 Quadro Plex 7000 also has superior memory performance overall.

The Quadro Plex 7000 has 57.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 460, which means that the memory performance of the Quadro Plex 7000 is much better than the GTX 460.

The GeForce GTX 460 SLI has 672 Shader Processing Units and the Quadro Plex 7000 has 1024. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 907 and the actual shader performance of the Quadro Plex 7000 is 1176. The Quadro Plex 7000 having 269 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Quadro Plex 7000 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 460.

The GeForce GTX 460 SLI requires 380 Watts to run and the Quadro Plex 7000 requires 600 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 460 and a PSU with at least 900 Watts for the Quadro Plex 7000. The Quadro Plex 7000 requires 220 Watts more than the GTX 460 to run. The difference is significant enough that the Quadro Plex 7000 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 460.