In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon R9 M275X are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 8850M.

The Radeon R9 M275X has a 275 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the Radeon HD 8850M. This results in the Radeon R9 M275X providing 11 GTexel/s better texturing performance. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The Radeon R9 M275X has a 275 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 8850M and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the Radeon R9 M275X providing 4.4 GPixel/s better pixeling performance. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The Radeon R9 M275X was released less than a year after the Radeon HD 8850M, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The Radeon HD 8850M and the Radeon R9 M275X have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The Radeon R9 M275X has 32 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 8850M, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon R9 M275X is noticeably better than the Radeon HD 8850M.

Both the Radeon HD 8850M and the Radeon R9 M275X have 640 Shader Processing Units. While the two GPUs have the same number of SPUs, the actual performance delivered by the Radeon R9 M275X is 592 and by the Radeon HD 8850M is 592. Knowing that the shader performance of the Radeon R9 M275X is superior, it is not necessary to examine the GPUs' respective Texture and Pixel Fill Rates.

The Radeon HD 8850M requires 45 Watts to run and the Radeon R9 M275X requires 50 Watts. The Radeon R9 M275X requires 5 Watts more than the Radeon HD 8850M to run. The difference is not significant enough for the Radeon R9 M275X to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon HD 8850M.