In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R7 260X v2 Sapphire OC 1GB Edition are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition.

The R7 260X has a 325 MHz higher core clock speed but 16 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the HD 5850. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the R7 260X manages to provide 6.6 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 R7 260X has a 325 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the R7 260X. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 6.4 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 260X. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 260X was released over three years more recently than the HD 5850, and so the R7 260X 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 Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition and the Radeon R7 260X v2 Sapphire OC 1GB Edition have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The HD 5850 has 32 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 260X, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is noticeably better than the R7 260X.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon R7 260X v2 Sapphire OC 1GB Edition has 896. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522 and the actual shader performance of the R7 260X is 800. The R7 260X having 278 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 5850 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The R7 260X transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5850. This means that the R7 260X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 5850. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the R7 260X should consume less power than the HD 5850.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition requires 151 Watts to run and the Radeon R7 260X v2 Sapphire OC 1GB Edition requires 105 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 R7 260X. The HD 5850 requires 46 Watts more than the R7 260X to run. The difference is significant enough that the HD 5850 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the R7 260X.