In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti Golden Sample Edition are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition.

The GTX 560 Ti has a 175 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 560 Ti manages to provide 5.4 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 560 Ti has a 175 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 560 Ti providing 5.6 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 GTX 560 Ti was released over a year more recently than the HD 5850, and so the GTX 560 Ti 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 Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition and the GeForce GTX 560 Ti Golden Sample Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GTX 560 Ti has 6.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 5850, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 560 Ti is marginally better than the HD 5850.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 560 Ti Golden Sample Edition has 384. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 560 Ti is 691. The GTX 560 Ti having 169 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 560 Ti delivers a slightly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data 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 GeForce GTX 560 Ti Golden Sample Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850.