GeForce GTX 850M: FPS benchmarks and laptop guide

The GeForce GTX 850M brought Maxwell's efficiency to mid-range gaming laptops in 2014 — the chip that let a 17-inch multimedia machine game without sounding like a hairdryer. The catalog has benchmarked it in 53 games at 1080p, with a single matched model in the channel.

Where the GTX 850M sits in 2026

The catalog scores the chip at 18.2 — 217th of 341 scored mobile GPUs, below the table's midpoint. The neighbors mark Maxwell's landing: the Radeon 840M (18.5), Quadro M1200 (18.4) and Quadro M620 (18.4) above; the Radeon Vega 8 (17.6), MX230 (17) and Radeon 610M (17) below. Ranking level with modern budget integrated graphics is the story — the Vega 8 and 610M in its band ship free inside current CPUs, which frames what a used buyer should pay for this silicon: effectively nothing.

What the chip brings

The first-generation Maxwell recipe: 640 shader cores on 28 nm, 2 GB of DDR3, a 45 W envelope and roughly 1.16 TFLOPS. The DDR3 memory (rather than GDDR5) was the cost-cut that separated the 850M from its 860M sibling and caps its ceiling to this day. CUDA support for period media workflows. Public synthetics: PassMark 2534, Fire Strike 3086, OpenCL 9840.

FPS in games at 1080p

For its tier the table holds a usable esports band at the high preset: CS:GO and Overwatch at 240 FPS, GTA V and PUBG at 140, F1 2014 at 85, Valorant at 65, Dirt Rally at 58, Dota 2 at 50, Alien: Isolation and GRID Autosport at 44, The Sims 4 at 41 and Mad Max, Metal Gear Solid V and Rainbow Six Siege at 39. The modern boundary is sharp: Fortnite at 35, Counter-Strike 2 at 30, Forza Horizon 4 at 27, The Witcher 3 at 21, Far Cry 5 at 18, Cyberpunk 2077 at 12, Resident Evil 4 Remake at 10.

Laptops that carry it

One model name-matches: HP's Envy 17 from 2014, listed at $220 — a big-screen multimedia machine of the chip's era, with roster medians of gaming index 17 and mobility 9 describing a desk-bound laptop, not a portable one.

Bottom line

The GTX 850M is a fair $220-laptop citizen: it will still push the esports classics and the 2014–2016 single-player catalog at honest frame rates, and its 45 W Maxwell design runs cooler than its numbers suggest. As a value proposition against modern silicon it concedes everything — integrated Vega 8 matches it, and any entry RTX chip triples it, as the catalog's compare pages show in a single glance. Buy the Envy 17 for the 17-inch screen at a bargain price; the GPU is included but not the reason.