In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra are significantly better than the AMD Radeon X1050.

The FX 5900 has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the Radeon X1050. This results in the FX 5900 providing 0.2 GTexel/s better texturing performance. Neither of these GPUs support DirectX 10 or higher, so Texture Rate holds more weight than when comparing more modern GPUs.

The FX 5900 has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon X1050 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the FX 5900 providing 0.2 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon X1050 was released over three years more recently than the FX 5900, and so the Radeon X1050 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the FX 5900 when running the latest games.

Both GPUs exhibit very poor performance, so rather than upgrading from one to the other you should consider looking at more powerful GPUs. Neither of these will be able to run the latest games in any playable way.

The FX 5900 has 128 MB more video memory than the Radeon X1050, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the FX 5900 also has superior memory performance overall.

The FX 5900 has 8.3 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon X1050, which means that the memory performance of the FX 5900 is marginally better than the Radeon X1050.

Both the Radeon X1050 and the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra have 4 Shader Processing Units. While the two GPUs have the same number of SPUs, the actual performance delivered by the FX 5900 is 2 and by the Radeon X1050 is 2. Knowing that the shader performance of the FX 5900 is superior, it is not necessary to examine the GPUs' respective Texture and Pixel Fill Rates.

The Radeon X1050 transistor size technology is 20 nm (nanometers) smaller than the FX 5900. This means that the Radeon X1050 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the FX 5900. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the Radeon X1050 should consume less power than the FX 5900.

The Radeon X1050 requires 24 Watts to run and the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra requires 59 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the Radeon X1050. The FX 5900 requires 35 Watts more than the Radeon X1050 to run. The difference is significant enough that the FX 5900 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the Radeon X1050.