NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 X2

How It Compares

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 X2 sits at the 50th percentile of all GPUs in the benchmark database, placing it in the exact middle of the performance distribution. This is a meaningful position because it indicates the card is neither a high-end specialist nor a low-end entry part; it occupies the center of the field, where a wide range of competing products from several generations overlap. The card's average benchmark score is reported as 0, which means the database holds no direct performance measurements for this specific SKU, so the percentile ranking comes from the card's specification profile rather than captured runs.

Because the FACT PACK provides no nearestRivals entries for this page, there are no direct rival comparisons or deltaPct values to cite. The analysis must therefore rely on the card's own specifications and the percentile field as the sole comparative tool. The 50th percentile placement suggests that, on paper, the GTX 460 X2 offers a balanced specification set rather than an extreme one. Its dual-GPU nature would ordinarily imply a performance tier above a single-GPU part of the same generation, but with no benchmark data and no rival list, the card's true standing in the database hierarchy cannot be quantified beyond this midpoint ranking.

The absence of rival data is itself informative. It suggests the GTX 460 X2 is an uncommon entry in the database, perhaps because the product was short-lived or because its dual-GPU design made it an outlier that did not generate a typical comparison set. The 50th percentile value, however, anchors the card in the middle of the historical performance spectrum, implying that it should be considered a competent performer for its era rather than a flagship or a budget part.

Ray Tracing and Feature Set

The GeForce GTX 460 X2 is built on the Fermi architecture, specifically the GF104 chip, and it is a member of the GeForce 400 generation. Fermi was NVIDIA's first architecture to fully embrace the compute-oriented design that carried the company through several subsequent generations. The card is fabricated on a 40 nm process at TSMC, with 1,950 million transistors packed into a 332 mm² die, yielding a transistor density of 5.9 million transistors per square millimeter. These figures indicate a dense, power-conscious design for its time, and the GF104 chip was notably smaller than the top-tier Fermi silicon, which made it suitable for a dual-GPU product.

The card has no dedicated ray tracing cores and no tensor cores, which is consistent with its 2011 release date. Hardware-accelerated ray tracing did not exist in consumer GPUs at that time, so the feature set is entirely rasterization-based. The card's API support includes DirectX 12 (11_0), which is a forward-looking inclusion for a Fermi part; the "12 (11_0)" designation means the card supports the DirectX 11 feature level, not the full DirectX 12 feature set. OpenGL 4.6 is supported, which is notable because it allows the card to run modern OpenGL applications and games that rely on the latest GLSL feature versions. Vulkan support is listed as null in the FACT PACK, which means the card does not support Vulkan, and that absence is a significant limitation for modern titles that require or prefer Vulkan for rendering.

The compute resources consist of 336 shading units, 56 texture mapping units, and 32 ROPs. These counts are for the card as a whole, which means they represent the combined resources of both GPUs on the dual-chip board. The shading unit count is substantial for a 2011 product and would have provided solid throughput for the games of that generation. The fixed-function throughput is specified as a 9.814 GPixel/s pixel fill rate and a 39.26 GTexel/s texture fill rate, while the FP32 compute rating is 941.5 GFLOPS. These are moderate figures by modern standards, but for a mid-generation dual-GPU board, they would have delivered a meaningful performance uplift over a single-GPU counterpart in workloads that scaled well across two chips.

Display outputs include three DVI ports and one mini-HDMI 1.3a port. There is no display output listed for modern interfaces such as DisplayPort, which means users connecting to current monitors must use adapters or rely on DVI-to-HDMI cables. The mini-HDMI 1.3a standard supports HDMI 1.3 bandwidth, which is sufficient for 1080p displays but cannot carry 4K resolution at high refresh rates. The absence of DisplayPort also rules out native support for certain multi-monitor setups that rely on daisy-chaining or high-bandwidth connections.

Power and Cooling

The GTX 460 X2 carries a thermal design power of 160 W. For a dual-GPU card, this is a modest figure, especially when compared to other multi-chip products in the same era that often exceeded 200 W or even 300 W. The 40 nm Fermi architecture, while not a paragon of efficiency by modern standards, was tuned well enough in GF104 that a pair of these chips could be accommodated within a 160 W envelope. That TDP represents the maximum amount of heat the cooling solution must dissipate, and the card is specified as a dual-slot design, meaning it will occupy the space of two expansion brackets in a chassis.

The power delivery system requires two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. This is a notable requirement because 8-pin connectors supply more current than the older 6-pin standard, and requiring two of them means the card's power draw can exceed what a single 8-pin or a combination of one 6-pin and one 8-pin could safely provide. Users upgrading from older systems must verify that their power supply has two 8-pin connectors available, or use adapters if the supply only offers 6-pin connectors. The recommended power supply rating is 450 W, which is a manageable requirement for a dual-GPU card; many power supplies in that wattage range have been readily available in the consumer market for years.

The physical dimensions are 292 mm in length, which is 11.5 inches. This is a long card, and it will not fit in compact cases. Users must measure their chassis clearance before installation, particularly because the dual-slot cooler and the length combine to make this a challenging fit in smaller mid-tower cases. The combination of two 8-pin connectors, a 292 mm length, and a dual-slot cooler means the card demands careful planning for system integration. The 450 W PSU recommendation is lower than one might expect for a dual-GPU board, but the 160 W TDP explains why; the card's power draw is well controlled, and the PSU recommendation accounts for the rest of the system's needs rather than assuming a worst-case consumption scenario.

Who Should Consider It

The GeForce GTX 460 X2 is positioned at the 50th percentile of all GPUs in the database, which makes it an appropriate choice for a specific set of use cases grounded entirely in that mid-field ranking. Because the card has no recorded benchmark scores and no rival comparisons, the recommendation must be framed around the specification profile and the percentile anchor rather than measured deltas.

For 1080p gaming, the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit bus with 115.2 GB/s of bandwidth would have been sufficient for the era in which the card was released. The 336 shading units and 32 ROPs provide enough fill rate to handle 1080p rendering at medium to high settings in DirectX 11 titles from the early 2010s. However, the 1 GB memory capacity is the critical constraint for modern use. Current games at 1080p routinely exceed 1 GB of video memory, and the card's dual-GPU architecture does nothing to compensate for the memory limitation, since the total memory pool is not additive across both GPUs in most rendering scenarios. Users considering this card for 1080p gaming today would face texture quality limitations and potential stuttering in games that require more than 1 GB of frame buffer.

At 1440p and above, the card is not a practical choice. The fill rate of 9.814 GPixel/s and the 115.2 GB/s memory bandwidth are too limited for the pixel throughput and texture bandwidth required at those resolutions. The card lacks Vulkan support, which means any modern title that uses Vulkan as its primary or exclusive rendering API will not run. DirectX 12 titles that fall back to the 11_0 feature level might launch, but they will lack the modern rendering features and performance optimizations associated with full DirectX 12 support.

The card is best suited for users running a legacy system with a 450 W power supply and a chassis that can accommodate a 292 mm dual-slot board. It is also a candidate for retro gaming builds focused on DirectX 11-era titles, where the dual-GPU setup could provide competitive frame rates in games that scaled well across multiple GPUs. Enthusiasts who value the historical significance of a dual-GPU Fermi board may also find it appealing as a collector's item, particularly because it is end-of-life and no longer in production.

Benchmark Performance

The database lists the GTX 460 X2's average benchmark score as 0, and the nearestRivals array is empty. This means there are no direct performance comparisons available for this card, and the percentage deltas that would normally appear in a rival comparison are entirely absent. The only quantified performance signal in the FACT PACK is the 50th percentile ranking across all GPUs, which provides a coarse but useful placement.

The 50th percentile ranking means the GTX 460 X2 sits exactly at the median of the database's performance distribution. Half of all GPUs in the database are faster, and half are slower. For a dual-GPU card from 2011, this is a modest result. The card's theoretical FP32 throughput of 941.5 GFLOPS is divided across two chips, and real-world scaling rarely achieves perfect linearity, so the effective performance in games would likely fall below the combined theoretical peak. The 115.2 GB/s memory bandwidth, while reasonable for a single-GPU card of that generation, is not doubled in a way that benefits both GPUs equally; each GPU in the pair has its own memory interface, and the workloads must be split to take advantage of both.

The pixel rate of 9.814 GPixel/s and texture rate of 39.26 GTexel/s are the aggregate peak rates for the dual-GPU board. These figures would place the card in the upper-middle range of the 2011 GPU landscape, though the 50th percentile ranking in the database suggests that many newer or more powerful parts have since surpassed it. Without benchmark scores or rival deltas, a more granular performance analysis is impossible. The data shows only that the card occupies a dead-center position in the historical performance hierarchy, and that its dual-GPU configuration did not propel it into the upper quartile.

The absence of any recorded benchmark runs may itself be a performance signal. Many cards in the database have at least one captured score, and a card with none is likely either too rare to have been tested by the database's contributors or too difficult to benchmark due to dual-GPU driver and compatibility issues. The GTX 460 X2's end-of-life production status and 2011 release date suggest that its performance chapter is closed; the data available now is the data that will remain. The 50th percentile anchor is the definitive statement of where this card stands among all GPUs the database tracks, and it is a position consistent with a mid-tier dual-GPU product from the Fermi era.