GeForce 920M vs GeForce 9400 GT 256MB

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB, which comes with core clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 400 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR2 memory. It features 16 SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 920M will be 13% quicker than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 920M		14400 MB/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 920M is much (approximately 594%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB. (explain)

GeForce 920M		30528 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		4400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26128 (594%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 920M is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 920M		7632 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		2200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5432 (247%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.