In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 8740 (OEM).

The R7 260X has a 230 MHz higher core clock speed and 24 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 8740. This results in the R7 260X providing 32.1 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 R7 260X has a 230 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 8740 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the R7 260X providing 3.7 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 260X was released less than a year after the HD 8740, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The HD 8740 has 1024 MB more video memory than the R7 260X, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the R7 260X has superior memory performance.

The R7 260X has 24 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 8740, which means that the memory performance of the R7 260X is slightly better than the HD 8740.

The Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition has 896 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 8740 (OEM) has 512. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 260X is 784 and the actual shader performance of the HD 8740 is 348. The R7 260X having 436 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R7 260X delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 8740.

The Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition requires 105 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 8740 (OEM) requires 55 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the R7 260X and a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the HD 8740. The R7 260X requires 50 Watts more than the HD 8740 to run. The difference is significant enough that the R7 260X may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 8740.