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 AMD Radeon R7 250 Sapphire 1GB Edition.

The R7 260X has a 30 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the R7 250. This results in the R7 260X providing 33.7 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 30 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Render Output Units than the R7 250. This results in the R7 260X providing 8.5 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

Both the Radeon R7 250 Sapphire 1GB Edition and the Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition were released at the same time, so are likely to be quite similar.

The Radeon R7 250 Sapphire 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 22.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 250, which means that the memory performance of the R7 260X is slightly better than the R7 250.

The Radeon R7 250 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 384 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R7 260X v2 PowerColor OC 1GB Edition has 896. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 250 is 343 and the actual shader performance of the R7 260X is 784. The R7 260X having 441 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 R7 250.

The Radeon R7 250 Sapphire 1GB Edition requires 65 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 R7 250 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the R7 260X. The R7 260X requires 40 Watts more than the R7 250 to run. The difference is significant enough that the R7 260X may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 250.