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 650 Ti Gainward 1GB Edition.

The HD 6870 has a 2 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 650 Ti, but the GTX 650 Ti has 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 6870. As a result, the GTX 650 Ti exhibits a 7.3 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 6870. 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 2 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Render Output Units than the GTX 650 Ti. This results in the HD 6870 providing 15 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 GTX 650 Ti was released less than a year after the HD 6870, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti Gainward 1GB Edition and the Radeon HD 6870 MSI Hawk 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 6870 has 48 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 650 Ti, which means that the memory performance of the HD 6870 is noticeably better than the GTX 650 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti Gainward 1GB Edition has 768 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6870 MSI Hawk 1GB Edition has 1120. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 650 Ti is 713 and the actual shader performance of the HD 6870 is 521. The GTX 650 Ti having 192 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 6870 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GTX 650 Ti transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 6870. This means that the GTX 650 Ti is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 6870.