GeForce GTS 150 vs GeForce GTX 850M

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 850M, which features clock speeds of 876 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
	Difference: 101 Watts (253%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so in theory they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 150 is a lot (more or less 35%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 850M. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12320 (35%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 850M is the winner, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2176 (18%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.