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 460 v2.

The GTX 460 has a 53 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 460. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 8.6 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 460. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 460 has a 53 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 460 providing 1.7 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 460 was released over a year more recently than the HD 5850, and so the GTX 460 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 GeForce GTX 460 v2 have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GTX 460 has 0.3 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 5850, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 460 is marginally better than the HD 5850.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 460 v2 has 336. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 523. The GTX 460 having 1 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 5850 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition requires 151 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 460 v2 requires 160 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 GTX 460. The GTX 460 requires 9 Watts more than the HD 5850 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GTX 460 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the HD 5850.