In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 290 XFX Double Dissipation Edition are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 SLI.

The R9 290 has a 272 MHz higher core clock speed and 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 460. This results in the R9 290 providing 75.9 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 R9 290 has a 272 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the R9 290 providing 17.4 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 R9 290 was released over three years more recently than the GTX 460, and so the R9 290 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GTX 460 when running the latest games.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The R9 290 has 2048 MB more video memory than the GTX 460, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R9 290 also has superior memory performance overall.

The R9 290 has 89.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 460, which means that the memory performance of the R9 290 is much better than the GTX 460.

The Radeon R9 290 XFX Double Dissipation Edition has 2560 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 460 SLI has 672. However, the actual shader performance of the R9 290 is 2061 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 907. The R9 290 having 1154 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R9 290 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 460.

The R9 290 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 460. This means that the R9 290 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 460.

The Radeon R9 290 XFX Double Dissipation Edition requires 250 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 460 SLI requires 380 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 750 Watts for the R9 290 and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 460. The GTX 460 requires 130 Watts more than the R9 290 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 460 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R9 290.