In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 EVGA SC 2GB Edition.

The GTX 650 has a 477 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 40 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 650. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 13.7 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 650. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 650 has a 477 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the GTX 650. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 4 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 650. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 650 was released over a year more recently than the HD 5850, and so the GTX 650 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 GTX 650 has 1024 MB more video memory than the HD 5850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The HD 5850 has 48 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 650, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is noticeably better than the GTX 650.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 650 EVGA SC 2GB Edition has 384. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 650 is 462. The HD 5850 having 60 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 5850 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 650.

The GTX 650 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5850. This means that the GTX 650 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 and the GeForce GTX 650 EVGA SC 2GB Edition requires 64 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850 and a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the GTX 650. The HD 5850 requires 87 Watts more than the GTX 650 to run. The difference is significant enough that the HD 5850 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 650.