In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 740 v2 Gigabyte OC 2GB Edition.

The GT 740 has a 297 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850, but the HD 6850 has 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the GT 740. As a result, the HD 6850 exhibits a 2.9 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GT 740. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GT 740 has a 297 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850, but the HD 6850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the GT 740. As a result, the HD 6850 exhibits a 7.6 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GT 740. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GT 740 was released over three years more recently than the HD 6850, and so the GT 740 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 6850 when running the latest games.

The GT 740 has 1024 MB more video memory than the HD 6850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The HD 6850 has 48 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GT 740, which means that the memory performance of the HD 6850 is noticeably better than the GT 740.

The GeForce GT 740 v2 Gigabyte OC 2GB Edition has 384 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the GT 740 is 412 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372. The GT 740 having 40 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 6850 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GT 740 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 6850. This means that the GT 740 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 6850.

The GeForce GT 740 v2 Gigabyte OC 2GB Edition requires 64 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the GT 740 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6850. The HD 6850 has been recommended a PSU with 100 Watts more than the GT 740. The difference is significant enough that the HD 6850 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GT 740.