In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 Sonic Edition are significantly better than the AMD Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition.

The R7 260X has a 280 MHz higher core clock speed but 4 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 570. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the R7 260X manages to provide 12.7 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 280 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 570, but the GTX 570 has 24 more Render Output Units than the R7 260X. As a result, the GTX 570 exhibits a 13.5 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 570, 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 570.

The GTX 570 has 256 MB more video memory than the R7 260X, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 570 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 570 has 60 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 260X, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 570 is much better than the R7 260X.

The Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition has 896 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 570 Sonic Edition has 480. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 260X is 784 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 570 is 720. The R7 260X having 64 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GTX 570 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The R7 260X transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 570. This means that the R7 260X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 570.

The Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition requires 105 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 570 Sonic Edition requires 219 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 GTX 570. The GTX 570 requires 114 Watts more than the R7 260X to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 570 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 260X.