GeForce GTX 460 768 MB

The GeForce GTX 460 1 GB graphics card comes with seven of eight SMs enabled, which cuts the number of available CUDA cores to 336 and texture units to 56. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 768 MB uses the same configuration of 336 CUDA cores and 56 TMUs.

But if you go beyond the front of the pipeline, then the two graphics cards start to differ. The 1GB version uses all four sections of the ROP, delivering up to 32 pixels per clock and benefiting from a full 256-bit memory bus and a full 512KB L2 cache. Meanwhile, a 768 MB video card uses three of the four partitions, if the number of ROPs is reduced to 24, the memory bus is reduced to 192 bits, and the L2 cache is reduced to 384 KB.

However, Nvidia hasn't made any other changes to differentiate these graphics cards, which is good. The clock speeds are the same, with fixed-function units running at 675 MHz, shader processors running at 1350 MHz, and GDDR5 memory running at 900 MHz physical (which gives an effective frequency of 3600 MT/s).

 The GeForce GTX 460 768 MB, priced to match the Radeon HD 5830, is slightly less attractive. Less memory degrades performance at high resolutions with anti-aliasing active, and narrowing the memory bus width resulted in a reduction in bandwidth, which slowed down its performance.