In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 5870 2048MB are noticeably better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 465.

The HD 5870 has a 243 MHz higher core clock speed and 36 more Texture Mapping Units than the GeForce GTX 465. This results in the HD 5870 providing 41.3 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 HD 5870 has a 243 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 465 and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the HD 5870 providing 7.8 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 GeForce GTX 465 was released less than a year after the HD 5870, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The HD 5870 has 1024 MB more video memory than the GeForce GTX 465, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the HD 5870 also has superior memory performance overall.

The HD 5870 has 50.9 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce GTX 465, which means that the memory performance of the HD 5870 is much better than the GeForce GTX 465.

The GeForce GTX 465 has 352 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 5870 2048MB has 1600. However, the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 465 is 427 and the actual shader performance of the HD 5870 is 680. The HD 5870 having 253 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the HD 5870 delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GeForce GTX 465.

The GeForce GTX 465 requires 200 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 5870 2048MB requires 195 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 550 Watts for the GeForce GTX 465 and a PSU with at least 500 Watts for the HD 5870. The GeForce GTX 465 requires 5 Watts more than the HD 5870 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GeForce GTX 465 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the HD 5870.