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 9800 GTX SLI.

The HD 6850 has a 100 MHz higher core clock speed than the 9800 GTX, but the 9800 GTX has 64 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 6850. As a result, the 9800 GTX exhibits a 38.4 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 100 MHz higher core clock speed than the 9800 GTX and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 6850 providing 3.2 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 HD 6850 was released over a year more recently than the 9800 GTX, 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 9800 GTX.

The GeForce 9800 GTX SLI and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 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 9800 GTX has 12.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 6850, which means that the memory performance of the 9800 GTX is slightly better than the HD 6850.

The GeForce 9800 GTX SLI has 128 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the 9800 GTX is 86 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372. The HD 6850 having 286 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the 9800 GTX performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The HD 6850 transistor size technology is 25 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 9800 GTX. This means that the HD 6850 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 9800 GTX.

The GeForce 9800 GTX SLI requires 280 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the 9800 GTX and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6850. The 9800 GTX has been recommended a PSU with 100 Watts more than the HD 6850. The difference is significant enough that the 9800 GTX may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 6850.