In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 v4 Asus DirectCU Silent 1GB Edition are very slightly better than the AMD Radeon R7 240 2GB.

The R7 240 has a 136 MHz higher core clock speed but 4 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the GTS 450. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the R7 240 manages to provide 0.3 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 240 has a 136 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTS 450, but the GTS 450 has 8 more Render Output Units than the R7 240. As a result, the GTS 450 exhibits a 3.7 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 240. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 240 was released over a year more recently than the GTS 450, and so the R7 240 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTS 450.

The R7 240 has 1024 MB more video memory than the GTS 450, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R7 240 also has superior memory performance overall.

The R7 240 has 3.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTS 450, which means that the memory performance of the R7 240 is marginally better than the GTS 450.

The GeForce GTS 450 v4 Asus DirectCU Silent 1GB Edition has 144 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R7 240 2GB has 320. However, the actual shader performance of the GTS 450 is 171 and the actual shader performance of the R7 240 is 212. The R7 240 having 41 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R7 240 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTS 450.

The R7 240 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTS 450. This means that the R7 240 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTS 450. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the R7 240 should consume less power than the GTS 450.

The GeForce GTS 450 v4 Asus DirectCU Silent 1GB Edition requires 75 Watts to run and the Radeon R7 240 2GB requires 30 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the GTS 450 and a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the R7 240. The GTS 450 requires 45 Watts more than the R7 240 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTS 450 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 240.