In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R7 260X v3 Asus OC 2GB Edition are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition.

The R7 260X has a 350 MHz higher core clock speed but 16 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the HD 5850. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the R7 260X manages to provide 8 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 R7 260X has a 350 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the R7 260X. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 6 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 260X. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 260X was released over three years more recently than the HD 5850, and so the R7 260X 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 R7 260X 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, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The HD 5850 has 48 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 260X, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is noticeably better than the R7 260X.

The Radeon R7 260X v3 Asus OC 2GB Edition has 896 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 260X is 819 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522. The R7 260X having 297 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 5850 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The R7 260X transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5850. This means that the R7 260X is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 5850. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the R7 260X should consume less power than the HD 5850.

The Radeon R7 260X v3 Asus OC 2GB Edition requires 85 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 260X and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850. The HD 5850 requires 66 Watts more than the R7 260X 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 260X.