In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon HD 6970M are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 8850M.

The Radeon HD 6970M has a 55 MHz higher core clock speed and 8 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 8850M. This results in the Radeon HD 6970M providing 7.6 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 6970M has a 55 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Render Output Units than the Radeon HD 8850M. This results in the Radeon HD 6970M providing 11.8 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 a year more recently than the Radeon HD 6970M, and so the Radeon HD 8850M is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the Radeon HD 6970M.

The Radeon HD 8850M and the Radeon HD 6970M have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The Radeon HD 6970M has 83.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 8850M, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 6970M is much better than the Radeon HD 8850M.

The Radeon HD 8850M has 640 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 6970M has 960. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 8850M is 496 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 6970M is 326. The Radeon HD 8850M having 170 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Radeon HD 6970M performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon HD 8850M transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Radeon HD 6970M. This means that the Radeon HD 8850M is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Radeon HD 6970M.

The Radeon HD 8850M requires 45 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 6970M requires 75 Watts. The Radeon HD 6970M requires 30 Watts more than the Radeon HD 8850M to run. The difference is not significant enough for the Radeon HD 6970M to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon HD 8850M.