GeForce 9800 GTX vs GeForce GTX 860M

Intro

The GeForce 9800 GTX uses a 65 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 675 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM works at a frequency of 1100 MHz on this particular model. It features 128 SPUs along with 64 TAUs and 16 ROPs.

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 860M, which has a GPU core clock speed of 797 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 1152 SPUs, 96 TAUs, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster 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 can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the 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 clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.