In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R7 370 Sapphire Nitro 4GB Edition Crossfire are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition.

The R7 370 has a 10 MHz higher core clock speed and 64 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD 7850. This results in the R7 370 providing 63.7 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 R7 370 has a 10 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Render Output Units than the HD 7850. This results in the R7 370 providing 31.8 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The R7 370 was released over three years more recently than the HD 7850, and so the R7 370 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the HD 7850 when running the latest games.

The R7 370 has 7168 MB more video memory than the HD 7850, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the R7 370 also has superior memory performance overall.

The R7 370 has 204.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the HD 7850, which means that the memory performance of the R7 370 is massively better than the HD 7850.

The Radeon R7 370 Sapphire Nitro 4GB Edition Crossfire has 2048 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 7850 XFX Ultra OC Edition has 1024. However, the actual shader performance of the R7 370 is 1715 and the actual shader performance of the HD 7850 is 849. The R7 370 having 866 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the R7 370 delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the HD 7850.

The Radeon R7 370 Sapphire Nitro 4GB Edition Crossfire requires 300 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 600 Watts for the R7 370 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 7850. The R7 370 has been recommended a PSU with 100 Watts more than the HD 7850. The difference is significant enough that the R7 370 may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the HD 7850.