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 R7 250X PowerColor 1GB Edition.

The R7 250X has a 275 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the R7 250X. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 12.2 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the R7 250X. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The R7 250X has a 275 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the R7 250X. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 7.2 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 250X. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 250X was released over three years more recently than the HD 5850, and so the R7 250X 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 Radeon R7 250X PowerColor 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 56 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 250X, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is much better than the R7 250X.

The Radeon R7 250X PowerColor 1GB Edition has 640 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 250X is 544 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522. The R7 250X having 22 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 5850 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The R7 250X transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5850. This means that the R7 250X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 5850.

The Radeon R7 250X PowerColor 1GB Edition requires 80 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 450 Watts for the R7 250X and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850. The HD 5850 requires 71 Watts more than the R7 250X 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 R7 250X.