GeForce 8500 GT vs GeForce 930M

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce 930M, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 928 MHz. The DDR3 memory works at a frequency of 900 MHz on this particular card. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce 930M should perform a bit faster than the GeForce 8500 GT overall. (explain)

GeForce 930M		14400 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 930M is much (approximately 519%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

GeForce 930M		22272 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 18672 (519%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 930M is quite a bit (approximately 312%) better at FSAA than the GeForce 8500 GT, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce 930M		7424 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5624 (312%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core 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 processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant 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.