GeForce 8600 GTS vs GeForce GTX 850M

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GTS makes use of a 80 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 675 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 32 SPUs along with 16 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 850M, which has clock speeds of 876 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that 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 number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.