In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB are significantly better than the AMD Radeon RX 460 2GB.

The RX 460 has a 40 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 970, but the GTX 970 has 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the RX 460. As a result, the GTX 970 exhibits a 48.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the RX 460. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The RX 460 has a 40 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 970, but the GTX 970 has 40 more Render Output Units than the RX 460. As a result, the GTX 970 exhibits a 41.4 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the RX 460. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The RX 460 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 970, and so the RX 460 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 970.

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 GTX 970 has 2048 MB more video memory than the RX 460, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 970 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 970 has 224.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the RX 460, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 970 is massively better than the RX 460.

The Radeon RX 460 2GB has 896 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 970 4GB has 1664. However, the actual shader performance of the RX 460 is 1075 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 970 is 2646. The GTX 970 having 1571 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 970 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the RX 460.

The RX 460 transistor size technology is 14 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 970. This means that the RX 460 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 970.

The Radeon RX 460 2GB requires 75 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 970 4GB requires 145 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the RX 460 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the GTX 970. The GTX 970 requires 70 Watts more than the RX 460 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 970 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the RX 460.