In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7850 Direct CU II are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti Gigabyte OC 1GB Edition.

The GTX 560 Ti has a 30 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the HD 7850. This results in the GTX 560 Ti providing 1.9 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 GTX 560 Ti has a 30 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 7850 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GTX 560 Ti providing 1 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 7850 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 560 Ti, and so the HD 7850 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 560 Ti.

The HD 7850 has 1024 MB more video memory than the GTX 560 Ti, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the HD 7850 also has superior memory performance overall.

The HD 7850 has 26.9 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 560 Ti, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7850 is slightly better than the GTX 560 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 560 Ti Gigabyte OC 1GB Edition has 384 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7850 Direct CU II has 1024. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 560 Ti is 691 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7850 is 757. The HD 7850 having 66 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 7850 delivers a slightly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 560 Ti.

The HD 7850 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 560 Ti. This means that the HD 7850 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 560 Ti. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the HD 7850 should consume less power than the GTX 560 Ti.