GeForce 9800 GTX vs GeForce GTX 860M

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 860M, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 797 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 1152 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
GeForce 9800 GTX		140 Watts
	Difference: 95 Watts (211%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce 9800 GTX should theoretically be a little bit better than the GeForce GTX 860M in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M should be a lot (about 77%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33312 (77%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 860M is a better choice, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1952 (18%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR 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 worked out 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 graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.