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 AMD Radeon HD 6790.

The Radeon HD 6790 has a 115 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 6790. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 18.6 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the Radeon HD 6790. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The Radeon HD 6790 has a 115 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the Radeon HD 6790. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 9.8 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the Radeon HD 6790. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon HD 6790 was released over a year more recently than the HD 5850, and so the Radeon HD 6790 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 Radeon HD 6790 have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The Radeon HD 6790 has 6.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 5850, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 6790 is marginally better than the HD 5850.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6790 has 800. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 6790 is 336. The HD 5850 having 186 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 5850 delivers a slightly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon HD 6790.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition requires 151 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 6790 requires 150 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 Radeon HD 6790. The HD 5850 requires 1 Watts more than the Radeon HD 6790 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 Radeon HD 6790.