GeForce 940M vs GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, which has clock speeds of 550 MHz on the GPU, and 500 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR2 RAM. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 TAUs and 12 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 should be just a bit (approximately 3%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 940M. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 940M		25728 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 672 (3%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 940M is superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 940M		8576 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1976 (30%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.