The AMD Radeon HD 8850M is a 28nm DirectX 11 graphics card based on the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture. Built primarily for medium-sized laptops, the card is positioned in the performance category as of 2013. Compared to the similar Radeon HD 7850M, the 8850M offers slightly different clock speeds.
The design of the Radeon 8800M series has its roots to the Cape Verde chip as found, for example, on the desktop Radeon HD 7770 with 640 1D shader cores and 40 texture units. However the core clock of the 8850M is only 575-725 MHz (or up to 625-775 MHz with Boost) versus the 1000 MHz of the desktop HD 7770. As a result, general performance of the HD 8850M should be similar to the desktop HD 7750.
Equipped with GDDR5 memory, the HD 8850M competes with the Nvidia GTX 660M. The DDR3 version of the HD 8850M is expected to be a bit slower, although it could offer higher clock rates. Many games of 2013 can be played fluently in medium or high detail and resolution settings.
The 640 shader cores can be used with OpenCL 1.2 for general-purpose calculations.
Features of the 8850M include video decoding via UVD3 for decoding MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, and Flash directly from the AMD GPU. Multi-View Codec (MVC) and MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, xVid) HD videos are now compatible as well.
The 8800M series also supports automatic graphics switching between the integrated GPU and discrete GPU. Called Enduro, the technology supersedes AMD's Dynamic Switchable Graphics and is similar to Nvidia's Optimus. Furthermore, the 8850M can directly support up to 6 connected monitors using Eyefinity Technology if Enduro is disabled.
Other features of the 8800M series include ZeroCore for reducing power consumption when the display is turned off and Power Gating to power down areas of the chip that are not used. PowerTune allows automatic overclocking and underclocking of the graphics card as long as the GPU is within its TDP limit. For example, the chip may be underclocked when running FurMark and OCCT, but will overclock in certain games like Lost Planet, Crysis or Resident Evil 5.
The integrated HD audio processor is able to transmit HD Audio (TrueHD or DTS Master Audio) over HDMI and DisplayPort (e.g., for Blu-Ray videos). Additionally, it now allows audio to output simultaneously and in parallel to multiple devices with the new Discrete Digital Multipoint Audio (DDMA) feature.
Power consumption of the 8850M should be below that of the 8870M, corresponding to the core clock. Therefore, the 8850M is suited for medium-sized laptops and DTRs.
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance
Game Benchmarks
The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailed information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.
- Average benchmark values for this graphics card
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