GeForce 930M vs GeForce 9400 GT 256MB

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB, which comes with clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 400 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR2 RAM. It features 16 SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce 930M should be just a bit faster than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce 930M		14400 MB/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 930M is much (about 406%) more effective at AF than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB. (explain)

GeForce 930M		22272 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		4400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17872 (406%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 930M is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 930M		7424 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		2200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5224 (237%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics 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 most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.