In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 6870 MSI Hawk 1GB Edition are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 465.

The HD 6870 has a 323 MHz higher core clock speed and 12 more Texture Mapping Units than the GeForce GTX 465. This results in the HD 6870 providing 25.4 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 6870 has a 323 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 465 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 6870 providing 10.4 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 6870 was released less than a year after the GeForce GTX 465, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The Radeon HD 6870 MSI Hawk 1GB Edition and the GeForce GTX 465 have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The HD 6870 has 31.7 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce GTX 465, which means that the memory performance of the HD 6870 is noticeably better than the GeForce GTX 465.

The Radeon HD 6870 MSI Hawk 1GB Edition has 1120 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 465 has 352. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 6870 is 521 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 465 is 427. The HD 6870 having 94 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 6870 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GeForce GTX 465.

The GeForce GTX 465 requires 200 Watts to run but there is no entry for the HD 6870. We would recommend a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GeForce GTX 465, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the HD 6870.