In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Edition are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition.

The GTX 560 Ti has a 7 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 560 Ti. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 5.4 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 560 Ti. 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 7 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 0.2 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 GTX 560 Ti has 256 MB more video memory than the HD 5850, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the HD 5850 has superior memory performance.

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

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Edition has 448. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 560 Ti is 656. The GTX 560 Ti having 134 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 560 Ti delivers a marginally 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 and the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Edition requires 210 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850 and a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 560 Ti. The GTX 560 Ti requires 59 Watts more than the HD 5850 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 560 Ti may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 5850.