In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon R7 250 v2 MSI OC 2GB + Radeon R7 7870K Dual.

The R7 250 has a 325 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 250 manages to provide 6.6 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 R7 250 has a 325 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the R7 250. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 6.4 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the R7 250. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 250 was released over three years more recently than the HD 5850, and so the R7 250 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 250 has 2048 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 70.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the R7 250, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is much better than the R7 250.

The Radeon R7 250 v2 MSI OC 2GB + Radeon R7 7870K Dual 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 250 is 838 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522. The R7 250 having 316 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 5850 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The R7 250 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5850. This means that the R7 250 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 5850.

The Radeon R7 250 v2 MSI OC 2GB + Radeon R7 7870K Dual 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 400 Watts for the R7 250 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850. The HD 5850 requires 1 Watts more than the R7 250 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 R7 250.