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 Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 Galaxy GC 1GB Edition.

The R7 260X has a 205 MHz higher core clock speed and 24 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTS 450. This results in the R7 260X providing 31.3 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 205 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTS 450 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the R7 260X providing 3.3 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 over three years more recently than the GTS 450, 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 GTS 450 when running the latest games.

The GeForce GTS 450 Galaxy GC 1GB Edition and the Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The R7 260X has 36.9 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTS 450, which means that the memory performance of the R7 260X is noticeably better than the GTS 450.

The GeForce GTS 450 Galaxy GC 1GB Edition has 192 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition has 896. However, the actual shader performance of the GTS 450 is 317 and the actual shader performance of the R7 260X is 784. The R7 260X having 467 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 GTS 450.

The R7 260X transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTS 450. This means that the R7 260X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTS 450.

The GeForce GTS 450 Galaxy GC 1GB Edition requires 106 Watts to run and the Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition requires 105 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the GTS 450 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the R7 260X. The GTS 450 requires 1 Watts more than the R7 260X to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GTS 450 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the R7 260X.