In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7850 Direct CU II are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition.

The HD 7850 has a 145 MHz higher core clock speed but 8 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the HD 5850. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the HD 7850 manages to provide 3.5 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 HD 7850 has a 145 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 7850 providing 4.6 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 7850 was released over a year more recently than the HD 5850, and so the HD 7850 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 5850.

The HD 7850 has 1024 MB more video memory than the HD 5850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the HD 7850 also has superior memory performance overall.

The HD 7850 has 26.9 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 5850, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7850 is slightly better than the HD 5850.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7850 Direct CU II has 1024. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7850 is 757. The HD 7850 having 235 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 7850 delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 5850.

The HD 7850 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5850. This means that the HD 7850 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 5850.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition requires 151 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 7850 Direct CU II. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850.