GeForce 830M vs GeForce GT 320

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GT 320, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 540 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 790 MHz on this specific card. It features 72 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 830M		25 Watts
GeForce GT 320		43 Watts
	Difference: 18 Watts (72%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GT 320 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 830M in general. (explain)

GeForce GT 320		25280 MB/sec
GeForce 830M		14400 MB/sec
	Difference: 10880 (76%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 830M is much (more or less 27%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 320. (explain)

GeForce 830M		16464 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 320		12960 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3504 (27%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 830M is a lot (about 91%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 320, and able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce 830M		8232 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 320		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3912 (91%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.