In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970MX 3GB are massively better than the AMD Radeon HD 8850M.

The GTX 970MX has a 299 MHz higher core clock speed and 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 8850M. This results in the GTX 970MX providing 56.3 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 GTX 970MX has a 299 MHz higher core clock speed and 40 more Render Output Units than the Radeon HD 8850M. This results in the GTX 970MX providing 41.7 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 GTX 970MX was released over three years more recently than the Radeon HD 8850M, and so the GTX 970MX is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the Radeon HD 8850M when running the latest games.

The GTX 970MX has 1024 MB more video memory than the Radeon HD 8850M, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the GTX 970MX also has superior memory performance overall.

The GTX 970MX has 88.3 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 8850M, which means that the memory performance of the GTX 970MX is much better than the Radeon HD 8850M.

The GeForce GTX 970MX 3GB has 1408 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 8850M has 640. However, the actual shader performance of the GTX 970MX is 1973 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 8850M is 496. The GTX 970MX having 1477 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the GTX 970MX delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon HD 8850M.

The GeForce GTX 970MX 3GB requires 75 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 8850M requires 45 Watts. The GTX 970MX requires 30 Watts more than the Radeon HD 8850M to run. The difference is not significant enough for the GTX 970MX to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the Radeon HD 8850M.