GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs GeForce GTX 850M

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 850M, which features GPU clock speed of 876 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
	Difference: 105 Watts (263%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 850M overall. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (120%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 1GB will be much (about 35%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 850M. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12192 (35%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 850M is the winner, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2208 (19%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of 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.