GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB vs GeForce GTX 860M

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 860M, which comes with GPU core speed of 797 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1152 Stream Processors, 96 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		84 Watts
	Difference: 39 Watts (87%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 860M should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M is quite a bit (approximately 190%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 50112 (190%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M should be a lot (about 93%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher 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 number 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 speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.