In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 SLI are massively better than the AMD Radeon HD 7730 v2 Sapphire 2GB Edition.

The HD 7730 has a 125 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 88 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7730. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 56.4 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 7730. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 7730 has a 125 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 56 more Render Output Units than the HD 7730. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 36.8 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 7730. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD 7730 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 460, and so the HD 7730 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 460.

The Radeon HD 7730 v2 Sapphire 2GB Edition and the GeForce GTX 460 SLI have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GTX 460 has 201.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7730, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 460 is massively better than the HD 7730.

The Radeon HD 7730 v2 Sapphire 2GB Edition has 384 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 460 SLI has 672. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7730 is 261 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 907. The GTX 460 having 646 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 460 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 7730.

The HD 7730 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 460. This means that the HD 7730 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 460.

The Radeon HD 7730 v2 Sapphire 2GB Edition requires 47 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 460 SLI requires 380 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the HD 7730 and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 460. The GTX 460 requires 333 Watts more than the HD 7730 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 HD 7730.