In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX 470 HIS IceQ X2 OC 4GB are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 SLI.

The RX 470 has a 251 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 460. This results in the RX 470 providing 42.9 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 RX 470 has a 251 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 460, but the GTX 460 has 32 more Render Output Units than the RX 470. As a result, the GTX 460 exhibits a 13.6 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the RX 470. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The RX 470 was released over three years more recently than the GTX 460, and so the RX 470 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.

Both GPUs exhibit very powerful performance, so it probably isn't worth upgrading from one to the other, as both are capable of running even the most demanding games at the highest settings.

The RX 470 has 2048 MB more video memory than the GTX 460, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the RX 470 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 460 has 19.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the RX 470, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 460 is slightly better than the RX 470.

The Radeon RX 470 HIS IceQ X2 OC 4GB has 2048 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 460 SLI has 672. However, the actual shader performance of the RX 470 is 2572 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 907. The RX 470 having 1665 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the RX 470 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 460.

The RX 470 transistor size technology is 26 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 460. This means that the RX 470 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 460.

The Radeon RX 470 HIS IceQ X2 OC 4GB requires 120 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 460 SLI requires 380 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the RX 470 and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the GTX 460. The GTX 460 requires 260 Watts more than the RX 470 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 RX 470.