In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 Sparkle 1GB Edition are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition.

The GTX 750 has a 295 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 40 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 750. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 19.6 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 750. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 750 has a 295 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the GTX 750. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 6.9 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 750. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 750 was released over three years more recently than the HD 5850, and so the GTX 750 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 GeForce GTX 750 Sparkle 1GB Edition and the Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 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 47.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 750, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is noticeably better than the GTX 750.

The GeForce GTX 750 Sparkle 1GB Edition has 512 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 750 is 750 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522. The GTX 750 having 228 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 5850 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GTX 750 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5850. This means that the GTX 750 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 5850. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the GTX 750 should consume less power than the HD 5850.

The GeForce GTX 750 Sparkle 1GB Edition requires 55 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition requires 151 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the GTX 750 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850. The HD 5850 requires 96 Watts more than the GTX 750 to run. The difference is significant enough that the HD 5850 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 750.