In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 285M SLI are noticeably better than the AMD Radeon HD 8850M.

The Radeon HD 8850M has a 25 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 285M, but the GTX 285M has 88 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 8850M. As a result, the GTX 285M exhibits a 51.8 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the Radeon HD 8850M. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The Radeon HD 8850M has a 25 MHz higher core clock speed than the GTX 285M, but the GTX 285M has 16 more Render Output Units than the Radeon HD 8850M. As a result, the GTX 285M exhibits a 9.2 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the Radeon HD 8850M. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon HD 8850M was released over three years more recently than the GTX 285M, and so the Radeon HD 8850M is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the GTX 285M when running the latest games.

The Radeon HD 8850M and the GeForce GTX 285M SLI have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GTX 285M has 33.3 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 8850M, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 285M is noticeably better than the Radeon HD 8850M.

The Radeon HD 8850M has 640 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 285M SLI has 256. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 8850M is 496 and the actual shader performance of the GTX 285M is 154. The Radeon HD 8850M having 342 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GTX 285M performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon HD 8850M transistor size technology is 27 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GTX 285M. This means that the Radeon HD 8850M is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GTX 285M.

The Radeon HD 8850M requires 45 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 285M SLI requires 150 Watts. The GTX 285M requires 105 Watts more than the Radeon HD 8850M to run. The difference is significant enough that the GTX 285M may have an adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the Radeon HD 8850M.