In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon HD 8760 (OEM).

The HD 8760 has a 275 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 8760. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 12.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 8760. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 8760 has a 275 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the HD 8760. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 7.2 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 8760. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD 8760 was released over three years more recently than the HD 5850, and so the HD 8760 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 5850 when running the latest games.

The HD 8760 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 56 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 8760, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is much better than the HD 8760.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 8760 (OEM) has 640. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522 and the actual shader performance of the HD 8760 is 544. The HD 8760 having 22 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 5850 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The HD 8760 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5850. This means that the HD 8760 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 Radeon HD 8760 (OEM) requires 80 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850 and a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the HD 8760. The HD 5850 requires 71 Watts more than the HD 8760 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 HD 8760.