GeForce 8600 GTS vs GeForce 940M

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce 940M, which features a clock frequency of 1072 MHz and a DDR3 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 64-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 384 SPUs, 24 Texture Address Units, and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 8600 GTS should be much faster than the GeForce 940M overall. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
GeForce 940M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 940M should be quite a bit (about 138%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

GeForce 940M		25728 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14928 (138%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 940M should be a lot (approximately 59%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce 8600 GTS, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 940M		8576 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3176 (59%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount 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 speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's 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 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 potential to reach the maximum fill rate.