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 Nvidia Quadro K2200.

The HD 5850 has a 58 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the Quadro K2200. This results in the HD 5850 providing 25.5 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 5850 has a 58 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Render Output Units than the Quadro K2200. This results in the HD 5850 providing 12.5 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 Quadro K2200 was released over three years more recently than the HD 5850, and so the Quadro K2200 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 Quadro K2200 has 3072 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 Quadro K2200, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is noticeably better than the Quadro K2200.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440 Shader Processing Units and the Quadro K2200 has 640. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522 and the actual shader performance of the Quadro K2200 is 576. The Quadro K2200 having 54 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 5850 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Quadro K2200 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5850. This means that the Quadro K2200 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 Quadro K2200 requires 68 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 Quadro K2200. The HD 5850 requires 83 Watts more than the Quadro K2200 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 Quadro K2200.