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

The GTX 650 Ti has a 255 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 GTX 650 Ti manages to provide 10.5 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 GTX 650 Ti has a 255 MHz higher core clock speed but 8 fewer Render Output Units than the HD 5850. The lower ROP count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the GTX 650 Ti manages to provide 0.3 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 GTX 650 Ti was released over three years more recently than the HD 5850, and so the GTX 650 Ti 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 GTX 650 Ti 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 GTX 650 Ti also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 650 Ti has 16.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 5850, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 650 Ti is slightly better than the HD 5850.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Edition has 768. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 650 Ti is 793. The GTX 650 Ti having 271 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 650 Ti delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 5850.

The GTX 650 Ti transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5850. This means that the GTX 650 Ti 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 Ti Boost Edition requires 134 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 GTX 650 Ti. The HD 5850 requires 17 Watts more than the GTX 650 Ti to run. The difference is not significant enough for the HD 5850 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GTX 650 Ti.