GeForce 940M vs GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, which uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 550 MHz. The DDR2 memory runs at a speed of 500 MHz on this model. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 12 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 will be a bit (about 3%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 940M. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 940M		25728 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 672 (3%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 940M should be a lot (approximately 30%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 940M		8576 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1976 (30%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are 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 video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.