In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the AMD Radeon RX 5500M 4GB are massively better than the AMD Radeon HD 8850M.

The RX 5500M has a 750 MHz higher core clock speed and 48 more Texture Mapping Units than the Radeon HD 8850M. This results in the RX 5500M providing 96 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 RX 5500M has a 750 MHz higher core clock speed and 16 more Render Output Units than the Radeon HD 8850M. This results in the RX 5500M providing 34 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 RX 5500M was released over three years more recently than the Radeon HD 8850M, and so the RX 5500M 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 RX 5500M has 2048 MB more video memory than the Radeon HD 8850M, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The Radeon HD 8850M has 32 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the RX 5500M, which means that the memory performance of the Radeon HD 8850M is noticeably better than the RX 5500M.

The Radeon RX 5500M 4GB has 1408 Shader Processing Units and the Radeon HD 8850M has 640. However, the actual shader performance of the RX 5500M is 1506 and the actual shader performance of the Radeon HD 8850M is 496. The RX 5500M having 1010 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the RX 5500M delivers a massively smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the Radeon HD 8850M.

The RX 5500M transistor size technology is 21 nm (nanometers) smaller than the Radeon HD 8850M. This means that the RX 5500M is expected to run slightly cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the Radeon HD 8850M.

The Radeon RX 5500M 4GB requires 85 Watts to run and the Radeon HD 8850M requires 45 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the RX 5500M. The RX 5500M requires 40 Watts more than the Radeon HD 8850M to run. The difference is significant enough that the RX 5500M may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the Radeon HD 8850M.