In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the HD 6850 and the GTX 650 Ti are equal.

The GTX 650 Ti has a 153 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 6850. This results in the GTX 650 Ti providing 22.2 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 650 Ti has a 153 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850, but the HD 6850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the GTX 650 Ti. As a result, the HD 6850 exhibits a 10 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 650 Ti. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 650 Ti was released over a year more recently than the HD 6850, and so the GTX 650 Ti is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 6850.

The Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition and the GeForce GTX 650 Ti DirectCU II 1GB Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The HD 6850 has 41.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 650 Ti, which means that the memory performance of the HD 6850 is noticeably better than the GTX 650 Ti.

The Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 650 Ti DirectCU II 1GB Edition has 768. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 650 Ti is 713. The GTX 650 Ti having 341 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 6850 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GTX 650 Ti transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 6850. This means that the GTX 650 Ti is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 6850. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the GTX 650 Ti should consume less power than the HD 6850.

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti DirectCU II 1GB Edition requires 150 Watts to run but there is no entry for the HD 6850. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6850.