GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB vs GeForce GTX 950M

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 950M, which has a clock speed of 914 MHz and a DDR3 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950M		55 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		90 Watts
	Difference: 35 Watts (64%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 950M in general. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		57600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (80%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M is a little bit (more or less 17%) better at AF than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		31200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5360 (17%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M will be much (approximately 41%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		14624 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4224 (41%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.