In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 6870 XFX 2GB Edition are marginally better than the AMD Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition.

The R7 260X has a 130 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the HD 6870. This results in the R7 260X providing 7.3 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 130 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6870, but the HD 6870 has 16 more Render Output Units than the R7 260X. As a result, the HD 6870 exhibits a 12.3 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 three years more recently than the HD 6870, and so the R7 260X is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 6870 when running the latest games.

The HD 6870 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 HD 6870 also has superior memory performance overall.

The HD 6870 has 38.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 260X, which means that the memory performance of the HD 6870 is noticeably better than the R7 260X.

The Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition has 896 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6870 XFX 2GB Edition has 1120. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 260X is 784 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6870 is 504. The R7 260X having 280 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 6870 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The R7 260X transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 6870. This means that the R7 260X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 6870. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the R7 260X should consume less power than the HD 6870.

The Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition requires 105 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 6870 XFX 2GB Edition requires 150 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the R7 260X and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the HD 6870. The HD 6870 requires 45 Watts more than the R7 260X to run. The difference is significant enough that the HD 6870 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 260X.