I've been planning on upgrading my old Raddy 4850 512MB for a long time but looks like I will finally have the cash next Friday so i'm looking to spend around €200 but I cant make my mind up between the GTX460 1GB and the Raddy 6850 1GB. I've been looking at reviews and both cards are extremely close in most benchmarks. What I want to know is if anyone has used any of these cards and what you think of them personally.

Incidentally it's currently a toss up between the Zotac GTX460 AMP! and the Sapphire 6850 Toxic.

Possibly the best mid-range card for the price. Get this.

just got a Sapphire myself this week (HD 4850, as I am a bit out of money *gg*), I am loving it. Rendering everything really good and they also offer never tweaked drivers than AMD itself.

What is your processor? I have a GTX 480 and it is really choked by my Intel Q9550, it wants an i7 to really show off what it can do.

If you can wait a little longer then you might consider the Nvidia Geforce GTX560 Ti coming very soon. The pre-release price was set between 220-240$ but I'm pretty sure it will drop quickly once it's available. The GTX500 series is basically the GTX400 series done right. Power consumption and heat dissipation have been reworked for those cards, from all I've seen and tested at this time if you want a Fermi chip GFX card then I'd recommend one of the GTX500 series. If that is out of the question then go with AMD, they have the lowest power drain and enough performance to keep up with the Nvidia cards if not even surpassing them (even the high-end single GPU cards of the 5000 series can compete with the new GTX500s)

Even though ATI/AMD has made real progress lately, if tend to prefer NVidia's drivers and control panel. Of course, hardware-related criterions prevail, but if you can't make up your mind based on hardware features, maybe you should include software preference in your choice.

On a side note, I also own a Sapphire card (radeon HD4890 Vapor-X), bought it about a year ago, and so far so good. The Vapor-X system is nice, keeping the card very cool without making too much noise (for a gaming computer : overall, my rig is still pretty noisy).

Q6600 clocked at 3.2Ghz. It's certainly showing it's age now but a full Mobo and Chip upgrade at the moment is out of the question :(

My first experience with Radeon was horrid but I think it's because I was trying to run a newer card on an eight-year-old machine.

I plugged a Radeon HD3650 512 RAM into my old Compaq Presario and it was a complete crash fest. Every other game I tried to run would blue screen.

I had to keep plugging back in my old Geforce 5200 FX for stability.

Recently I've been given an Geoforce 7300 GT 512 RAM, for free, and it's been happy times ever since.

Yeah, same here. Since that processor is lower than mine though you might want to look up some info on the subject. I upgraded from a GTX 260 to the GTX 480 and because of my processor barely saw any performance increase.

If you go for the 6850 I'd recommend to go for the 6870 instead if possible. The 6800 are not actually a step up from the 5800, but rather a more refined lower power version, according to benchmarks the 6850 comes in under the 5850 in performance whereas the 6870 sits comfortably between the 5850 and 5870. Of course, it all comes to money and what you intend to use it for, and whether it will make that much of a difference with your current setup.

I recently acquired this GTX 460 card, and I'm very satisfied with it so far. Of course, I've only had it a month, so it may have drawbacks I just haven't discovered yet, but so far I'm very pleased with it.

May I ask your reasons for upgrading? Just to get some more power ? Dx11 ? specific issues ?

4850 is starting to seriously chug in some games now and my monitor's native res is 1920x1080 so I just want to keep playing at that level. TBH I think it's more the 512MB memory that's the problem because it really can't handle more than 2AA in most newer releases and provide a playable frame rate at that res.

I'm not sure about all the features that are supported. I know ATI seems to have better DX11 tesselation support and Nvidia has PhysX but in all honesty do those things really matter?

With one GPU you probably won't be using Physx anyway, even on a 460. I keep Physx off to maintain a high framerate with my 480.

I do think the card is bandwidth starved at that resolution, but I think it's more the card showing it's age due to the architecture.

I would buy the 6850, as of now PhysX support is being leapfrogged by DX11 support. I think the last showcase PhysX game was Mafia 2, and except for the new batman game, which might have PhysX, there has not been much else to suggest that it will be prominent this year. Not to mention you'll need two 460's to get above 30fps with heavy PhysX, in the case of Mafia 2.

DX11 has already been confirmed for two games this year, DA2 and Shogun: Total war. Add to that many more games that already use DX11, I would get the 6850 since it has better DX11 performance. Looking at the long term, over clocking the 6850 will most likely yield better results then an over-clocked 460.

It comes down to better support really. Both have 2 year warranties, but the zotac can extend up to 5 years. Since the cards are so close in price, that is what it comes down to.