AMD Radeon HD 8850M vs NVIDIA TITAN V CEO Edition Comparison

The NVIDIA TITAN V CEO Edition and the AMD Radeon HD 8850M occupy opposite ends of the GPU landscape, and the recorded data makes the gulf between them easy to quantify. The TITAN V CEO Edition is an end-of-life Volta datacenter-grade card built on TSMC's 12 nm process, while the HD 8850M is an end-of-life mobile part from AMD's GCN 1.0 era on a 28 nm node. Both are retired products, but the database shows they were designed for entirely different jobs: one is a 250 W compute accelerator with tensor hardware, the other a modest notebook GPU with a 128 bit memory bus. Despite that gap, their overall percentile placements against all GPUs in the database are closer than the raw silicon suggests, sitting at the 45th percentile for the TITAN V CEO Edition and the 40th percentile for the HD 8850M.

Head-to-Head Benchmarks

Direct head-to-head benchmark results between these two parts have not been recorded in the database, so the comparison must be assembled from their individual results and their respective rival clusters. The TITAN V CEO Edition posts a PassMark G3D score of 16988 and a PassMark G2D score of 1086, giving it an average benchmark score of 9037. The HD 8850M carries a single Geekbench OpenCL result of 7447, which is also its average benchmark score. Because the two cards were measured on different test suites, the numbers are not directly interchangeable, but the surrounding context is revealing.

The TITAN V CEO Edition's average score of 9037 places it within a fraction of a percent of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660, which averages 9022, a delta of 0.2 percent. It sits 0.2 percent behind the GeForce GTX 560 at 9058, 1.3 percent ahead of the AMD Radeon 550X at 8918, and 1.9 percent behind the AMD Radeon 890M at 9210. In other words, its G3D-heavy average lands it in a cluster of mainstream desktop cards even though its compute hardware is far more exotic than that grouping implies. The strong G3D result of 16988 pulls the average up while the weak G2D result of 1086 pulls it down, which explains the mid-range positioning.

The HD 8850M's OpenCL score of 7447 puts it in striking distance of a different cluster: the Intel UHD Graphics 750 at 7441, just 0.1 percent behind the AMD part, and the AMD Radeon R7 350 at 7425, which the HD 8850M beats by 0.3 percent. It trails the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, at 7472, by 0.3 percent, and the Intel Arc A310, at 7550, by 1.4 percent. That is respectable company for a mobile GCN 1.0 part: the GTX 1650 and Arc A310 are far newer designs, and matching them in OpenCL compute indicates the Venus chip's shading throughput held up reasonably in the measured workload.

The clearest single number favoring the TITAN V CEO Edition is its theoretical FP32 throughput of 14.90 TFLOPS against 800.0 GFLOPS for the HD 8850M, backed by FP16 throughput of 29.80 TFLOPS at a 2:1 ratio, a capability the AMD part simply lacks. Memory subsystems tell the same story: 868.4 GB/s of HBM2 bandwidth versus 64.00 GB/s of GDDR5 bandwidth.

FAQ

Q: Do these two GPUs share a benchmark result in the database?

A: No. The head-to-head benchmark list is empty. The TITAN V CEO Edition was measured with PassMark G3D and G2D, while the HD 8850M has a Geekbench OpenCL result, so cross-comparisons rely on their rival clusters rather than a shared test.

Q: How do their percentile rankings compare?

A: The TITAN V CEO Edition sits at the 45th percentile against all GPUs in the database; the HD 8850M sits at the 40th percentile. The five-point gap is modest relative to the enormous hardware differences between them.

Q: Which card has the stronger compute rival cluster?

A: The HD 8850M's OpenCL score of 7447 places it near the Intel Arc A310 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650, both modern discrete parts, which is a stronger showing relative to its age than the TITAN V CEO Edition's cluster of GTX 660-class cards.

Q: Can the HD 8850M handle half-precision workloads?

A: The database records no FP16 figure for the HD 8850M. The TITAN V CEO Edition delivers 29.80 TFLOPS FP16, double its FP32 rate, thanks to its 640 tensor cores.

Q: Are both products still in production?

A: No. Both are listed as end-of-life. The TITAN V CEO Edition was released in mid-2018, and the HD 8850M dates to early 2013.

Q: What bus interface do they use?

A: Both connect over PCIe 3.0 x16, one of the few specification points the two cards share.

Architecture Differences

The architectural distance between these parts spans five years and two full design philosophies. The TITAN V CEO Edition uses NVIDIA's Volta architecture on the GV100 chip, fabricated at TSMC on a 12 nm process. It packs 21,100 million transistors into an 815 mm² die, yielding a density of 25.9M transistors per mm². That is a datacenter-class die by any measure, and it includes 640 tensor cores dedicated to matrix math, a feature that exists purely for accelerated computing workloads.

The HD 8850M is built on AMD's GCN 1.0 architecture, codenamed Venus, on TSMC's 28 nm process. Its 1,500 million transistors fit into a 123 mm² die at a density of 12.2M per mm², roughly half the density of the Volta part. There are no tensor cores here; the design is a straightforward graphics-focused GCN implementation for the Solar System generation of mobile GPUs, part of the HD 8800M series.

Clock behavior differs sharply as well. The TITAN V CEO Edition runs a 1200 MHz base clock with a 1455 MHz boost, while the HD 8850M operates at 575 MHz base and 625 MHz boost. The NVIDIA part's predecessor and successor generations are listed as GeForce 900 and GeForce 20 respectively, whereas the AMD part followed the London lineage and preceded the Gem System.

Specification Differences

The specification table diverges almost everywhere. Shading units: 5120 on the TITAN V CEO Edition versus 640 on the HD 8850M. Texture units: 320 versus 40. Render output units: 128 versus 16. Those ratios carry through to the theoretical rates: 186.2 GPixel/s versus 10.00 GPixel/s pixel fill, and 465.6 GTexel/s versus 25.00 GTexel/s texture fill.

Memory is where the gap is widest. The TITAN V CEO Edition carries 32 GB of HBM2 on a 4096 bit bus, delivering 868.4 GB/s of bandwidth with memory clocked at 848 MHz, 1696 Mbps effective. The HD 8850M has 2 GB of GDDR5 on a 128 bit bus, 64.00 GB/s of bandwidth, and memory running at 1000 MHz, 4 Gbps effective.

Power and physical envelopes underline the desktop-versus-notebook split. The TITAN V CEO Edition has a 250 W TDP, a dual-slot cooler, one 6-pin plus one 8-pin power connector, and a suggested PSU of 600 W. The HD 8850M has no recorded TDP, slot width, power connectors, or suggested PSU, consistent with a soldered mobile part. Dimensions follow suit: the NVIDIA card measures 267 mm long, 112 mm tall, and 40 mm wide, while the AMD part has no recorded dimensions.

API support also differs. The TITAN V CEO Edition covers DirectX 12 at the 12_1 feature level, OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.4, with one HDMI 2.0 output and three DisplayPort 1.4a outputs. The HD 8850M covers DirectX 12 at the 11_1 feature level, OpenGL 4.6, and Vulkan 1.2.170, with no display outputs recorded in the database.

Where Each One Wins

The TITAN V CEO Edition wins every category where raw silicon matters. Its 14.90 TFLOPS of FP32, 640 tensor cores, and 868.4 GB/s of HBM2 bandwidth make it the only choice of the two for compute workloads, machine learning inference, and any task that benefits from half-precision math at 29.80 TFLOPS. Its PassMark G3D score of 16988 also points to substantially stronger gaming throughput than the HD 8850M could deliver, and its 32 GB memory capacity dwarfs the 2 GB available on the AMD part for large datasets or high-resolution assets.

The HD 8850M wins on the axes that matter for a mobile part. Its Geekbench OpenCL score of 7447 places it within 1.4 percent of the Intel Arc A310 and within 0.3 percent of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 in its recorded cluster, a strong relative showing for a 123 mm² die with 1,500 million transistors. Where the TITAN V CEO Edition needs a 600 W suggested PSU and dual-slot clearance, the Venus chip was designed to fit within a notebook's power and thermal envelope with no auxiliary power connectors at all.

Ultimately contextual. In absolute performance the Volta card is in a different class, with fill rates, bandwidth, and shader counts that exceed the HD 8850M by an order of magnitude. But judged against the database's full population, the two land only five percentile points apart, at the 45th and 40th percentiles respectively, a reminder that percentile placement depends heavily on which benchmarks were recorded and how averages are weighted across very different test suites.