In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 MSI Lightning 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 480. 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 480, but the GTX 480 has 32 more Render Output Units than the R7 260X. As a result, the GTX 480 exhibits a 19.5 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 three years more recently than the GTX 480, 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 GTX 480 when running the latest games.

The GTX 480 has 512 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 GTX 480 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 480 has 96 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 260X, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 480 is massively better than the R7 260X.

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

The R7 260X transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 480. This means that the R7 260X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 480.

The GeForce GTX 480 MSI Lightning Edition requires 250 Watts to run and the Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition requires 105 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 480 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the R7 260X. The GTX 480 requires 145 Watts more than the R7 260X to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 480 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 260X.