GeForce GTX 850M vs GeForce GTX 960

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 960, which features a clock frequency of 1127 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1750 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1024 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
GeForce GTX 850M		3340 points
	Difference: 4287 (128%)

Zcash Mining Hash Rate

GeForce GTX 960		154 Sol/s
GeForce GTX 850M		49 Sol/s
	Difference: 105 (214%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (200%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 960, in theory, should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 850M overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 80000 (250%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960 is much (about 106%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 850M. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 37088 (106%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is superior to the GeForce GTX 850M, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22048 (157%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record 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 the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant 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.