In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 5870 MSI Lightning Edition are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Power Edition OC 1GB.

The GTX 650 Ti has a 93 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5870, but the HD 5870 has 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 650 Ti. As a result, the HD 5870 exhibits a 8.4 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 650 Ti. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The GTX 650 Ti has a 93 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5870, but the HD 5870 has 16 more Render Output Units than the GTX 650 Ti. As a result, the HD 5870 exhibits a 12.9 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the GTX 650 Ti. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 650 Ti was released over a year more recently than the HD 5870, and so the GTX 650 Ti is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the HD 5870.

The Radeon HD 5870 MSI Lightning Edition and the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Power Edition OC 1GB have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The HD 5870 has 67.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 650 Ti, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5870 is much better than the GTX 650 Ti.

The Radeon HD 5870 MSI Lightning Edition has 1600 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Power Edition OC 1GB has 768. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5870 is 720 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 650 Ti is 763. The GTX 650 Ti having 43 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 5870 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GTX 650 Ti transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5870. This means that the GTX 650 Ti is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 5870.

The Radeon HD 5870 MSI Lightning Edition requires 188 Watts to run but there is no entry for the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Power Edition OC 1GB. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5870.