In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Asus DirectCU II TOP 1GB Edition are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition.

The GTX 560 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 6850. This results in the GTX 560 providing 14.6 GTexel/s better texturing performance. 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 has a 150 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 560 providing 4.8 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 was released less than a year after the HD 6850, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GeForce GTX 560 Asus DirectCU II TOP 1GB Edition and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 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 GTX 560 has 6.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 6850, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 560 is marginally better than the HD 6850.

The GeForce GTX 560 Asus DirectCU II TOP 1GB Edition has 336 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 560 is 622 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372. The GTX 560 having 250 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 560 delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 6850.

The GeForce GTX 560 Asus DirectCU II TOP 1GB Edition requires 150 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the GTX 560 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6850. The HD 6850 has been recommended a PSU with 50 Watts more than the GTX 560. The difference is significant enough that the HD 6850 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 560.