In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 are marginally better than the AMD Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition.

The HD 7850 has a 399 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 295, but the GeForce GTX 295 has 96 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7850. As a result, the GeForce GTX 295 exhibits a 29.8 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD 7850. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 7850 has a 399 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 295, but the GeForce GTX 295 has 24 more Render Output Units than the HD 7850. As a result, the GeForce GTX 295 exhibits a 1.1 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD 7850. 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 three years more recently than the GeForce GTX 295, and so the HD 7850 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GeForce GTX 295 when running the latest games.

The GeForce GTX 295 has 768 MB more video memory than the HD 7850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GeForce GTX 295 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GeForce GTX 295 has 70.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7850, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce GTX 295 is much better than the HD 7850.

The Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition has 1024 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 295 has 480. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7850 is 849 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 295 is 636. The HD 7850 having 213 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GeForce GTX 295 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The HD 7850 transistor size technology is 27 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce GTX 295. This means that the HD 7850 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce GTX 295. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the HD 7850 should consume less power than the GeForce GTX 295.

The GeForce GTX 295 requires 289 Watts to run but there is no entry for the HD 7850. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 7850 and a PSU with at least 680 Watts for the GeForce GTX 295. The GeForce GTX 295 has been recommended a PSU with 180 Watts more than the HD 7850. The difference is significant enough that the GeForce GTX 295 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 7850.