In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 745 (OEM).

The GTX 745 has a 258 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850, but the HD 6850 has 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 745. As a result, the HD 6850 exhibits a 4.1 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 745. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 745 has a 258 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850, but the HD 6850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the GTX 745. As a result, the HD 6850 exhibits a 8.3 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 745. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 745 was released over three years more recently than the HD 6850, and so the GTX 745 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 6850 when running the latest games.

The GTX 745 has 3072 MB more video memory than the HD 6850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the HD 6850 has superior memory performance.

The HD 6850 has 99.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 745, which means that the memory performance of the HD 6850 is massively better than the GTX 745.

The GeForce GTX 745 (OEM) has 384 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 745 is 536 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372. The GTX 745 having 164 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 6850 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GTX 745 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 6850. This means that the GTX 745 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 6850.

The GeForce GTX 745 (OEM) requires 55 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the GTX 745 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6850. The HD 6850 has been recommended a PSU with 200 Watts more than the GTX 745. The difference is significant enough that the HD 6850 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 745.