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

The Radeon HD 7850 has a 210 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 470. This results in the Radeon 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 Radeon 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 Radeon 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 Radeon HD 7850 was released over a year more recently than the GTX 470, and so the Radeon 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 Radeon HD 7850 has 768 MB more video memory than the GTX 470, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the Radeon HD 7850 also has superior memory performance overall.

The Radeon HD 7850 has 17.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 470, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon 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 has 1024. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 470 is 582 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 7850 is 749. The Radeon HD 7850 having 167 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon HD 7850 delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 470.

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

The GeForce GTX 470 Golden Sample Edition requires 215 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 7850 requires 130 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GTX 470 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the Radeon HD 7850. The GTX 470 requires 85 Watts more than the Radeon HD 7850 to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 470 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the Radeon HD 7850.