In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 570M are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 8850M.

The Radeon HD 8850M has a 50 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 570M, but the GeForce GTX 570M has 16 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 8850M. As a result, the GeForce GTX 570M exhibits a 7.2 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 50 MHz higher core clock speed than the GeForce GTX 570M, but the GeForce GTX 570M has 8 more Render Output Units than the Radeon HD 8850M. As a result, the GeForce GTX 570M exhibits a 3.8 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 a year more recently than the GeForce GTX 570M, 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 GeForce GTX 570M.

The Radeon HD 8850M has 512 MB more video memory than the GeForce GTX 570M, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, overall, the GeForce GTX 570M has superior memory performance.

The GeForce GTX 570M has 40 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 8850M, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce GTX 570M is noticeably better than the Radeon HD 8850M.

The Radeon HD 8850M has 640 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce GTX 570M has 336. However, the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 8850M is 496 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce GTX 570M is 386. The Radeon HD 8850M having 110 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GeForce GTX 570M performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Radeon HD 8850M transistor size technology is 12 nm (nanometers) smaller than the GeForce GTX 570M. This means that the Radeon HD 8850M is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the GeForce GTX 570M.

The Radeon HD 8850M requires 45 Watts to run and the GeForce GTX 570M requires 75 Watts. The GeForce GTX 570M requires 30 Watts more than the Radeon HD 8850M to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GeForce GTX 570M to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon HD 8850M.