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 GeForce GTX 260 v2.

The HD 5850 has a 149 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the GTX 260. This results in the HD 5850 providing 10.7 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 149 MHz higher core clock speed and 4 more Render Output Units than the GTX 260. This results in the HD 5850 providing 7.1 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 HD 5850 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 260, and so the HD 5850 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 260.

The HD 5850 has 128 MB more video memory than the GTX 260, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the HD 5850 also has superior memory performance overall.

The HD 5850 has 16.1 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 260, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is slightly better than the GTX 260.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 260 v2 has 216. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 260 is 286. The HD 5850 having 236 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 5850 delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 260.

The HD 5850 transistor size technology is 25 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 260. This means that the HD 5850 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 260.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition requires 151 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 260 v2 requires 182 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the GTX 260. The GTX 260 requires 31 Watts more than the HD 5850 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 260 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 5850.