In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 1.5GB (OEM) are significantly better than the AMD Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition.

The R7 260X has a 207 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 660, but the GTX 660 has 40 more Texture Mapping Units than the R7 260X. As a result, the GTX 660 exhibits a 21.3 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the R7 260X. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R7 260X has a 207 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 660, but the GTX 660 has 8 more Render Output Units than the R7 260X. As a result, the GTX 660 exhibits a 3.3 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 260X. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 260X was released over a year more recently than the GTX 660, and so the R7 260X is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 660.

The GTX 660 has 512 MB more video memory than the R7 260X, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 660 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 660 has 38.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 260X, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 660 is noticeably better than the R7 260X.

The Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition has 896 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 660 1.5GB (OEM) has 1152. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 260X is 784 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 660 is 1023. The GTX 660 having 239 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 660 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the R7 260X.

The Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition requires 105 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 660 1.5GB (OEM) requires 130 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the R7 260X and a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the GTX 660. The GTX 660 requires 25 Watts more than the R7 260X to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GTX 660 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the R7 260X.