GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB vs GeForce GTX 860M

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 860M, which has a clock speed of 797 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1152 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		84 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (87%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 860M should in theory be much better than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be quite a bit (more or less 190%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50112 (190%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 860M is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6152 (93%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends 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.