In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7790 PowerColor TurboDuo Edition are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition.

The HD 7790 has a 310 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the GTX 460. This results in the HD 7790 providing 17.4 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 7790 has a 310 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 16 more Render Output Units than the HD 7790. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 7.3 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 7790. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD 7790 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 460, and so the HD 7790 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 460.

The Radeon HD 7790 PowerColor TurboDuo Edition and the GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC 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 22.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7790, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 460 is slightly better than the HD 7790.

The Radeon HD 7790 PowerColor TurboDuo Edition has 896 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition has 336. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7790 is 963 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 514. The HD 7790 having 449 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GTX 460 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The HD 7790 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 460. This means that the HD 7790 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 460. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the HD 7790 should consume less power than the GTX 460.

We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 7790 and a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the GTX 460. The HD 7790 has been recommended a PSU with 50 Watts more than the GTX 460. The difference is significant enough that the HD 7790 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 460.