In this paper, investigation of the performance of a support vector machine (SVM) and artificial neural networks (ANN) in predicting solar radiation on PV panel surfaces with particular tilt angles was carried out on two sites in Saudi Arabia. The diffuse, direct, and global solar radiation data on a horizontal surface were used as the basis for predicting the radiation on a tilted surface. The amount of data used is equivalent to 360 days, averaged from the 5-min basis data. By solving the tilt angle equation, an optimum value of solar radiation was obtained using a tilt angle of 16 degrees and 37.5 degrees for Jeddah and Qassim locations, respectively. The evaluation of performance and comparison of results of ANN as well as SVM and the measured/calculated data are made on the basis of statistical measures including the root mean square error (RMSE), coefficient of correlation (CC), and magnitude of relative error (MRE). The speed of computation of the algorithms is also considered for comparison. Results indicate that for Jeddah, the CC for SVM is between 0.918 and 0.967 for training and in the range of 0.91981-0.97641 for testing while that of ANN is in the range of 0.517-0.9692 for training and 0.0361-0.0961 for testing. For Qassim, the results are even better with CC of 0.999 for training and 0.987 for testing ANN showed higher values of MRE ranging between 0.19 and 1.16 and SVM is between 0.33 and 0.51 for training and testing respectively. In terms of speed of computation, it is observed that SVM is faster than ANN in predicting solar radiation data with a lower speed of 2.15 s compared to 4.56 s for ANN during training. Moreover, SVM has lower values of RMSE indicating that it is robust and has the capability to minimize errors during computations. Therefore, SVM has significantly higher accuracy, robust during computation and is faster in predicting the radiation on the tilted surfaces in comparison with ANN. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.