In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 8850M are massively better than the Nvidia GeForce 8600M GT.

The Radeon HD 8850M was released over three years more recently than the GeForce 8600M GT, 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 GeForce 8600M GT when running the latest games.

The Radeon HD 8850M has 1792 MB more video memory than the GeForce 8600M GT, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the Radeon HD 8850M also has superior memory performance overall.

The Radeon HD 8850M has 9.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce 8600M GT, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 8850M is marginally better than the GeForce 8600M GT.

The Radeon HD 8850M has 640 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 8600M GT has 32. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 8850M is 496 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce 8600M GT is 15. The Radeon HD 8850M having 481 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon HD 8850M delivers a significantly smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GeForce 8600M GT.

The Radeon HD 8850M transistor size technology is 52 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce 8600M GT. This means that the Radeon HD 8850M is expected to run massively cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce 8600M GT.

The Radeon HD 8850M requires 45 Watts to run and the GeForce 8600M GT requires 20 Watts. The Radeon HD 8850M requires 25 Watts more than the GeForce 8600M GT to run. The difference is not significant enough for the Radeon HD 8850M to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the GeForce 8600M GT.