In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 5870 2048MB are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 EVGA Superclocked 1GB Edition.

The GTX 750 has a 365 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5870, but the HD 5870 has 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 750. As a result, the HD 5870 exhibits a 29.1 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 750. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 750 has a 365 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5870, but the HD 5870 has 16 more Render Output Units than the GTX 750. As a result, the HD 5870 exhibits a 7.8 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 750. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 750 was released over three years more recently than the HD 5870, and so the GTX 750 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 5870 when running the latest games.

The HD 5870 has 1024 MB more video memory than the GTX 750, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the HD 5870 also has superior memory performance overall.

The HD 5870 has 73.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 750, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5870 is much better than the GTX 750.

The GeForce GTX 750 EVGA Superclocked 1GB Edition has 512 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5870 2048MB has 1600. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 750 is 894 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5870 is 680. The GTX 750 having 214 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 5870 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GTX 750 transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5870. This means that the GTX 750 is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 5870. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the GTX 750 should consume less power than the HD 5870.

The GeForce GTX 750 EVGA Superclocked 1GB Edition requires 55 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 5870 2048MB requires 195 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the GTX 750 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5870. The HD 5870 requires 140 Watts more than the GTX 750 to run. The difference is significant enough that the HD 5870 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 750.