In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7850 1GB Sapphire Edition are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition.

The HD 7850 has a 210 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 470. This results in the HD 7850 providing 18.6 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 210 MHz higher core clock speed but 8 fewer Render Output Units than the GTX 470. The lower ROP count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the HD 7850 manages to provide 1.5 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 HD 7850 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 470, and so the HD 7850 is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the GTX 470.

The GTX 470 has 256 MB more video memory than the HD 7850, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The HD 7850 has 24 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 470, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7850 is slightly better than the GTX 470.

The GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition has 448 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7850 1GB Sapphire Edition has 1024. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 470 is 582 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7850 is 749. The HD 7850 having 167 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 7850 delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 470.

The HD 7850 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 470. This means that the HD 7850 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 470. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the HD 7850 should consume less power than the GTX 470.

The GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition requires 215 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 7850 1GB Sapphire Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 470.