In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon R7 250X MSI 1GB Edition.

The R7 250X has a 185 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the R7 250X. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 4.8 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the R7 250X. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R7 250X has a 185 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 16 more Render Output Units than the R7 250X. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 9.3 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 250X. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 250X was released over three years more recently than the GTX 460, and so the R7 250X is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GTX 460 when running the latest games.

The Radeon R7 250X MSI 1GB Edition and the GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition 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 46.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 250X, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 460 is noticeably better than the R7 250X.

The Radeon R7 250X MSI 1GB Edition has 640 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition has 336. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 250X is 517 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 514. The R7 250X having 3 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GTX 460 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The R7 250X transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 460. This means that the R7 250X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 460.

The Radeon R7 250X MSI 1GB Edition requires 83 Watts to run but there is no entry for the GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the R7 250X and a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the GTX 460. The GTX 460 has been recommended a PSU with 50 Watts more than the R7 250X. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 460 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 250X.