GeForce 840M vs GeForce 8500 GT

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce 8500 GT, which features core clock speeds of 450 MHz on the GPU, and 400 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 RAM. It features 16 SPUs as well as 8 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 840M		30 Watts
GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce 840M should perform much faster than the GeForce 8500 GT in general. (explain)

GeForce 840M		16000 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 840M is quite a bit (approximately 586%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

GeForce 840M		24696 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 21096 (586%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 840M will be a lot (approximately 357%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8500 GT, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce 840M		8232 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6432 (357%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.