The S&W .460 mag always has interested me because it can safely shoot .45 Colt and .454 Casull, as well as .460 S&W (and not that you’d want to but also the .45 Schofield). And in a sufficiently strong revolver (i.e., S&W .460, Ruger Blackhawk, Magnum Research BFR), you can load the .45 Colt hotter than the .44 Remington Magnum.
So you could shoot lite .45 Colt loads for plinking but carry full-house .460 magnums when you’re in bear country.
With a hot .460 load you don’t even have to hit the bear because the bark from that thing (65,000 psi Pmax!!!!) will set the woods on fire, which probably will do more to discourage the bear than the gunshot.
I have shot bears with rifles’, shotguns and a couple different handgun calibers.
I shoot and reload the 44mag, 45colt, 454 and 460.
Very top end 45colt loads are pushing hard on top 44mag loads
It all depends on what handguns one does the comparison with.
A short barreled 44 can be beat by a long barreled 45colt.
A 44mag with X powder and a 45colt with Y powder might give totally different velocities in different handguns.
The statement that a hot 45colt well be faster with the same bullet weight then a 44mag. I found generally doesn’t hold up. They can be really close. It all depends on the handgun load and bullet weight.
Now top loads in my 454 and in my 460s tend to be to much of a good thing.
I cap my recoil level in all of them to around a 300gr bullet at 1500fps I can get that out of my 44mag 14 inch contender. The same load in 4 to 7.5 inch guns give me 1150 to 1300fps.
I get 1500fps out of top loads for my 454 and easily with my 10 inch 460.
In 44mag to 500S@W I have well over twenty five thousand rounds fired.
The 44mag is a very decent compromise between size and power.
I am always torn between raw power and controllability. top and magnum loads are a lot harder to get follow up shots with