In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX 490X 8GB are massively better than the AMD Radeon RX 460 2GB.

The RX 460 has a 90 MHz higher core clock speed than the RX 490X, but the RX 490X has 328 more Texture Mapping Units than the RX 460. As a result, the RX 490X exhibits a 323 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 90 MHz higher core clock speed than the RX 490X, but the RX 490X has 112 more Render Output Units than the RX 460. As a result, the RX 490X exhibits a 110.6 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 less than a year after the RX 490X, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance 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 490X has 6144 MB more video memory than the RX 460, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The memory bandwidth of the Radeon RX 460 2GB and the Radeon RX 490X 8GB are the same, which means the RX 460 and the RX 490X have equal limitations when it comes to graphical data transfer.

The Radeon RX 460 2GB has 896 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon RX 490X 8GB has 6144. However, the actual shader performance of the RX 460 is 1075. The RX 490X having 5069 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the RX 490X delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the RX 460.

The Radeon RX 460 2GB requires 75 Watts to run and the Radeon RX 490X 8GB requires 250 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the RX 460 and a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the RX 490X. The RX 490X requires 175 Watts more than the RX 460 to run. The difference is significant enough that the RX 490X may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the RX 460.