In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Zotac 1GB Edition are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition.

The GTX 560 has a 95 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 560. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 6.3 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 560. 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 95 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 560 providing 3 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 over a year more recently than the HD 5850, and so the GTX 560 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 5850.

The GeForce GTX 560 Zotac 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 GTX 560 has 0.3 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 5850, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 560 is marginally better than the HD 5850.

The GeForce GTX 560 Zotac 1GB Edition has 336 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 560 is 551 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522. The GTX 560 having 29 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 560 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 5850.

The GeForce GTX 560 Zotac 1GB Edition requires 150 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 GTX 560 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850. The HD 5850 requires 1 Watts more than the GTX 560 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the HD 5850 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GTX 560.