GeForce 940M vs GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3, which comes with a core clock frequency of 550 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 800 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is made up of 32 SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 940M overall. (explain)

GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3		25600 MB/sec
GeForce 940M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (60%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 940M will be quite a bit (more or less 192%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3. (explain)

GeForce 940M		25728 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3		8800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16928 (192%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce 940M is superior to the GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 940M		8576 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3		4400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4176 (95%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one 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. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.