In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition.

The GeForce GTX 770 has a 71 MHz higher core clock speed and 64 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7850. This results in the GeForce GTX 770 providing 71.5 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 GeForce GTX 770 has a 71 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 7850 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the GeForce GTX 770 providing 2.3 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 GeForce GTX 770 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 GeForce GTX 770 has 1024 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 770 also has superior memory performance overall.

The GeForce GTX 770 has 70.7 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7850, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce GTX 770 is much better than the HD 7850.

The Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition has 1024 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 770 has 1536. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 7850 is 849 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 770 is 1667. The GeForce GTX 770 having 818 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GeForce GTX 770 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 7850.

The GeForce GTX 770 requires 230 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 550 Watts for the GeForce GTX 770. The GeForce GTX 770 has been recommended a PSU with 50 Watts more than the HD 7850. The difference is significant enough that the GeForce GTX 770 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 7850.