In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 280.

The HD 6850 has a 173 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 280, but the GeForce GTX 280 has 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 6850. As a result, the GeForce GTX 280 exhibits a 11 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 6850. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 6850 has a 173 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 280 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 6850 providing 5.5 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 HD 6850 was released over a year more recently than the GeForce GTX 280, and so the HD 6850 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GeForce GTX 280.

The Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition and the GeForce GTX 280 have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GeForce GTX 280 has 13.7 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 6850, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce GTX 280 is slightly better than the HD 6850.

The Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 280 has 240. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 280 is 332. The HD 6850 having 40 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GeForce GTX 280 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The HD 6850 transistor size technology is 25 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce GTX 280. This means that the HD 6850 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce GTX 280. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the HD 6850 should consume less power than the GeForce GTX 280.

The GeForce GTX 280 requires 236 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 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GeForce GTX 280. The GeForce GTX 280 has been recommended a PSU with 50 Watts more than the HD 6850. The difference is significant enough that the GeForce GTX 280 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 6850.