In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 5850 XFX Black 1GB Edition are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition.

The HD 5850 and the GTX 460 have the same core clock speed of 765 MHz, but the HD 5850 has 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the GTX 460. As a result, the HD 5850 exhibits a 12.3 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the GTX 460. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD 5850 and the GTX 460 have both the same core clock speed and the same Pixel Fill Rate. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The GTX 460 was released less than a year after the HD 5850, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The Radeon HD 5850 XFX Black 1GB Edition and the GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition 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 25.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 460, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5850 is slightly better than the GTX 460.

The Radeon HD 5850 XFX Black 1GB Edition has 1440 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition has 336. However, the actual shader performance of the HD 5850 is 551 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 460 is 514. The HD 5850 having 37 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 5850 delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 460.

The Radeon HD 5850 XFX Black 1GB Edition requires 151 Watts to run but there is no entry for the GeForce GTX 460 PNY 1GB OC Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5850 and a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the GTX 460. The HD 5850 has been recommended a PSU with 50 Watts more than the GTX 460. The difference is significant enough that the HD 5850 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 460.