In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD FirePro M5100 are significantly better than the AMD Radeon HD 8850M.

The FirePro M5100 has a 100 MHz higher core clock speed and the same number of Texture Mapping Units as the Radeon HD 8850M. This results in the FirePro M5100 providing 4 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 FirePro M5100 has a 100 MHz higher core clock speed than the Radeon HD 8850M and the same number of Render Output Units. This results in the FirePro M5100 providing 1.6 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 FirePro M5100 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 FirePro M5100 and the Radeon HD 8850M have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The FirePro M5100 has 40 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 8850M, which means that the memory performance of the FirePro M5100 is noticeably better than the Radeon HD 8850M.

Both the FirePro M5100 and the Radeon HD 8850M have 640 Shader Processing Units. The two GPUs are based on different architectures, but deliver an equivalent shader performance. To compare, we must continue to look at the memory bandwidth, Texture and Pixel Rates. In this case, the FirePro M5100 has 4 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate, 1.6 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate, and 40 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth, so should have a noticeably faster performance than the Radeon HD 8850M.

The FirePro M5100 requires 50 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 8850M requires 45 Watts. The FirePro M5100 requires 5 Watts more than the Radeon HD 8850M to run. The difference is not significant enough for the FirePro M5100 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon HD 8850M.