GeForce 8500 GT vs GeForce GTX 860M

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 860M, which comes with clock speeds of 797 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1152 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 860M, in theory, should be a lot faster than the GeForce 8500 GT overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 51200 (400%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be quite a bit (more or less 2025%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 72912 (2025%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 860M is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10952 (608%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 get to the max fill rate.