In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 5870 Asus v2 1GB Edition are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition.

The HD 5870 has a 75 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 6850. This results in the HD 5870 providing 30.8 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 HD 5870 has a 75 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 6850 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 5870 providing 2.4 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 HD 6850 was released less than a year after the HD 5870, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The Radeon HD 5870 Asus v2 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 HD 5870 has 25.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 6850, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5870 is slightly better than the HD 6850.

The Radeon HD 5870 Asus v2 1GB Edition has 1600 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5870 is 680 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6850 is 372. The HD 5870 having 308 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 5870 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 6850.

The Radeon HD 5870 Asus v2 1GB Edition requires 300 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 6850 Sapphire 1GB Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the HD 5870 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 6850. The HD 5870 has been recommended a PSU with 100 Watts more than the HD 6850. The difference is significant enough that the HD 5870 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 6850.