GeForce GTS 450 1GB vs GeForce GTX 960M

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 960M, which has a core clock speed of 1096 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised 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 960M		65 Watts
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		106 Watts
	Difference: 41 Watts (63%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 960M, in theory, should be a little bit faster than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 6272 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M is a lot (about 75%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 450 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18784 (75%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960M is the winner, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450 1GB		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5008 (40%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.