In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition are massively better than the Nvidia Quadro FX 5800.

The HD 7850 was released over three years more recently than the Quadro FX 5800, 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 Quadro FX 5800 when running the latest games.

The Quadro FX 5800 has 3072 MB more video memory than the HD 7850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the HD 7850 has superior memory performance.

The HD 7850 has 51.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Quadro FX 5800, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7850 is much better than the Quadro FX 5800.

The Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition has 1024 Shader Processing Units and the Quadro FX 5800 has 240. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7850 is 849 and the actual shader performance of the Quadro FX 5800 is 156. The HD 7850 having 693 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 Quadro FX 5800.

The HD 7850 transistor size technology is 37 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Quadro FX 5800. This means that the HD 7850 is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Quadro FX 5800.

The Quadro FX 5800 requires 189 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 750 Watts for the Quadro FX 5800. The Quadro FX 5800 has been recommended a PSU with 250 Watts more than the HD 7850. The difference is significant enough that the Quadro FX 5800 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 7850.