In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost MSI Twin Frozr OC 2GB Edition.

The GTX 650 Ti has a 58 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the HD 7850. This results in the GTX 650 Ti providing 3.7 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 58 MHz higher core clock speed than the HD 7850, but the HD 7850 has 8 more Render Output Units than the GTX 650 Ti. As a result, the HD 7850 exhibits a 6.4 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 less than a year after the HD 7850, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GTX 650 Ti has 1024 MB more video memory than the HD 7850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The HD 7850 has 9.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GTX 650 Ti, which means that the memory performance of the HD 7850 is marginally better than the GTX 650 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost MSI Twin Frozr OC 2GB Edition has 768 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition has 1024. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 650 Ti is 843 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7850 is 849. The HD 7850 having 6 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 7850 delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GTX 650 Ti.

The GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost MSI Twin Frozr OC 2GB Edition requires 140 Watts to run but there is no entry for the Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the GTX 650 Ti and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 7850. The HD 7850 has been recommended a PSU with 50 Watts more than the GTX 650 Ti. The difference is significant enough that the HD 7850 may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GTX 650 Ti.