In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 5850 Sapphire Vapor-X 1GB Edition are very slightly better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Power Edition OC 1GB.

The GTX 650 Ti has a 258 MHz higher core clock speed but 8 fewer Texture Mapping Units than the HD 5850. The lower TMU count doesn't matter, though, as altogether the GTX 650 Ti manages to provide 10.7 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 GTX 650 Ti has a 258 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 5850, but the HD 5850 has 16 more Render Output Units than the GTX 650 Ti. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 7.6 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 three years more recently than the HD 5850, and so the GTX 650 Ti is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 5850 when running the latest games.

The Radeon HD 5850 Sapphire Vapor-X 1GB 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 5850 has 48 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 650 Ti, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is noticeably better than the GTX 650 Ti.

The Radeon HD 5850 Sapphire Vapor-X 1GB Edition has 1440 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Power Edition OC 1GB has 768. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 529 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 650 Ti is 763. The GTX 650 Ti having 234 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the HD 5850 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GTX 650 Ti transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the HD 5850. This means that the GTX 650 Ti is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the HD 5850. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the GTX 650 Ti should consume less power than the HD 5850.

We would recommend a PSU with at least 600 Watts for the HD 5850.