In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition are massively better than the AMD Radeon HD 7730.

The HD 7850 has a 175 MHz higher core clock speed and 40 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 7730. This results in the HD 7850 providing 43.2 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 7850 has a 175 MHz higher core clock speed and 24 more Render Output Units than the Radeon HD 7730. This results in the HD 7850 providing 24.8 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 Radeon HD 7730 was released less than a year after the HD 7850, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition and the Radeon HD 7730 have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The HD 7850 has 81.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 7730, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7850 is much better than the Radeon HD 7730.

The Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition has 1024 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7730 has 384. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7850 is 849 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 7730 is 261. The HD 7850 having 588 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 7850 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon HD 7730.

The Radeon HD 7730 requires 47 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 400 Watts for the Radeon HD 7730. The HD 7850 has been recommended a PSU with 100 Watts more than the Radeon HD 7730. The difference is significant enough that the HD 7850 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the Radeon HD 7730.