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

The R7 260X has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 660, but the GTX 660 has 24 more Texture Mapping Units than the R7 260X. As a result, the GTX 660 exhibits a 20.7 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 50 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 7 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 1024 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 48.2 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 Direct CU II Edition has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 260X is 784 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 660 is 991. The GTX 660 having 207 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 but there is no entry for the GeForce GTX 660 Direct CU II Edition. 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 R7 260X has been recommended a PSU with 50 Watts more than the GTX 660. The difference is significant enough that the R7 260X may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 660.