In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 8850M are massively better than the Nvidia GeForce GT 320M.

The Radeon HD 8850M has a 125 MHz higher core clock speed and 32 more Texture Mapping Units than the GeForce GT 320M. This results in the Radeon HD 8850M providing 21 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 HD 8850M has a 125 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Render Output Units than the GeForce GT 320M. This results in the Radeon HD 8850M providing 6 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 HD 8850M was released over three years more recently than the GeForce GT 320M, 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 GT 320M when running the latest games.

The Radeon HD 8850M has 1024 MB more video memory than the GeForce GT 320M, 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 6.7 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the GeForce GT 320M, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 8850M is marginally better than the GeForce GT 320M.

The Radeon HD 8850M has 640 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GT 320M has 24. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 8850M is 496 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce GT 320M is 28. The Radeon HD 8850M having 468 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the Radeon HD 8850M delivers a noticeably smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the GeForce GT 320M.

The Radeon HD 8850M transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce GT 320M. This means that the Radeon HD 8850M is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce GT 320M.

The Radeon HD 8850M requires 45 Watts to run and the GeForce GT 320M requires 14 Watts. The Radeon HD 8850M requires 31 Watts more than the GeForce GT 320M to run. The difference is significant enough that the Radeon HD 8850M may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the GeForce GT 320M.