In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R7 250 Sapphire 1GB Edition Crossfire are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 465.

The R7 250 has a 393 MHz higher core clock speed and 4 more Texture Mapping Units than the GeForce GTX 465. This results in the R7 250 providing 21.3 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 250 has a 393 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 465, but the GeForce GTX 465 has 16 more Render Output Units than the R7 250. As a result, the GeForce GTX 465 exhibits a 3.4 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 250. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 250 was released over three years more recently than the GeForce GTX 465, and so the R7 250 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GeForce GTX 465 when running the latest games.

The R7 250 has 1024 MB more video memory than the GeForce GTX 465, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R7 250 also has superior memory performance overall.

The R7 250 has 44.5 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce GTX 465, which means that the memory performance of the R7 250 is noticeably better than the GeForce GTX 465.

The Radeon R7 250 Sapphire 1GB Edition Crossfire has 768 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 465 has 352. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 250 is 685 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 465 is 427. The R7 250 having 258 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R7 250 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GeForce GTX 465.

The R7 250 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce GTX 465. This means that the R7 250 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce GTX 465.

The Radeon R7 250 Sapphire 1GB Edition Crossfire requires 130 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 465 requires 200 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the R7 250 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GeForce GTX 465. The GeForce GTX 465 requires 70 Watts more than the R7 250 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GeForce GTX 465 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 250.