In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT 1GB SLI.

The HD 5850 has a 125 MHz higher core clock speed than the 9800 GT, but the 9800 GT has 40 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 5850. As a result, the 9800 GT exhibits a 15 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 5850. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 5850 has a 125 MHz higher core clock speed than the 9800 GT and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 5850 providing 4 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 HD 5850 was released over a year more recently than the 9800 GT, and so the HD 5850 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the 9800 GT.

The 9800 GT has 1024 MB more video memory than the HD 5850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the HD 5850 has superior memory performance.

The HD 5850 has 12.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 9800 GT, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is slightly better than the 9800 GT.

The GeForce 9800 GT 1GB SLI has 224 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440. However, the actual shader performance of the 9800 GT is 336 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522. 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 9800 GT.

The HD 5850 transistor size technology is 25 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 9800 GT. This means that the HD 5850 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 9800 GT.

The GeForce 9800 GT 1GB SLI requires 200 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 500 Watts for the 9800 GT and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850. The 9800 GT requires 49 Watts more than the HD 5850 to run. The difference is significant enough that the 9800 GT may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 5850.