GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs GeForce GTX 850M

Intro

Compare all 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 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		47 Watts
	Difference: 7 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 850M should in theory be quite a bit better than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 19200 (150%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M will be a lot (approximately 306%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM). (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26400 (306%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M should be a lot (about 224%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM), and capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9696 (224%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at 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 that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to 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 reach the max fill rate.