GeForce 9800 GTX vs GeForce GTX 850M

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 850M, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 876 MHz. The DDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (250%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce 9800 GTX should theoretically be a lot superior to the GeForce GTX 850M overall. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 38400 (120%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GTX will be much (about 23%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 850M. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8160 (23%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M should be quite a bit (about 30%) more effective at AA than the GeForce 9800 GTX, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3216 (30%)

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 data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's 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 rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.