In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX Vega 9 are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition.

The RX Vega has a 375 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 5850. This results in the RX Vega providing 35.8 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 RX Vega has a 375 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the RX Vega providing 12 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 RX Vega was released over three years more recently than the HD 5850, and so the RX Vega 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 HD 5850 has 1024 MB video memory, but the RX Vega does not have an entry, so the two GPUs cannot be reliably compared in this area.

The Radeon RX Vega 9 has 576 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition has 1440. However, the actual shader performance of the RX Vega is 487 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 522. The HD 5850 having 35 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 5850 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the RX Vega.

The RX Vega transistor size technology is 26 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5850. This means that the RX Vega is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 5850.

The Radeon HD 5850 MSI Twin Frozr II 1GB Edition requires 151 Watts to run but there is no entry for the RX Vega. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the RX Vega.