You should not care too much about performances. Redis is faster per core with small values, but memcached is able to use multiple cores with a single executable and TCP port without help from the client. Also memcached is faster with big values in the order of 100k. Redis recently improved a lot about big values (unstable branch) but still memcached is faster in this use case. The point here is: nor one or the other will likely going to be your bottleneck for the query-per-second they can deliver.
You should care about memory usage. For simple key-value pairs memcached is more memory efficient. If you use Redis hashes, Redis is more memory efficient. Depends on the use case.
You should care about persistence and replication, two features only available in Redis. Even if your goal is to build a cache it helps that after an upgrade or a reboot your data are still there.
You should care about the kind of operations you need. In Redis there are a lot of complex operations, even just considering the caching use case, you often can do a lot more in a single operation, without requiring data to be processed client side (a lot of I/O is sometimes needed). This operations are often as fast as plain GET and SET. So if you don’t need just GEt/SET but more complex things Redis can help a lot (think at timeline caching).