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 GTS 450 EVGA SuperClocked 1GB Edition.

The GTS 450 has a 107 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850, but the HD 6850 has 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTS 450. As a result, the HD 6850 exhibits a 9 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTS 450. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTS 450 has a 107 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850, but the HD 6850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the GTS 450. As a result, the HD 6850 exhibits a 10.7 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTS 450. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD 6850 was released less than a year after the GTS 450, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GeForce GTS 450 EVGA SuperClocked 1GB Edition 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 HD 6850 has 67.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTS 450, which means that the memory performance of the HD 6850 is much better than the GTS 450.

The GeForce GTS 450 EVGA SuperClocked 1GB Edition has 192 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the GTS 450 is 339 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372. The HD 6850 having 33 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 6850 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTS 450.

The GeForce GTS 450 EVGA SuperClocked 1GB Edition requires 107 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the GTS 450 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6850. The HD 6850 has been recommended a PSU with 100 Watts more than the GTS 450. The difference is significant enough that the HD 6850 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTS 450.