GeForce 820M vs GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB, which features GPU core speed of 550 MHz, and 1536 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 800 MHz through a 192-bit bus. It also is comprised of 96 Stream Processors, 48 Texture Address Units, and 12 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 820M		15 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		84 Watts
	Difference: 69 Watts (460%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB should be 140% quicker than the GeForce 820M in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		38400 MB/sec
GeForce 820M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 22400 (140%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB will be quite a bit (approximately 129%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 820M. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 820M		11504 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14896 (129%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB is superior to the GeForce 820M, by far. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		6600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 820M		2876 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3724 (129%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over 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 type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, 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 figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.