GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 vs GeForce 940M

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce 940M, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 1072 MHz. The DDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 384 SPUs as well as 24 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce 940M overall. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
GeForce 940M		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (40%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 940M will be quite a bit (approximately 198%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3. (explain)

GeForce 940M		25728 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17088 (198%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 940M should be a lot (about 99%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 940M		8576 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB GDDR3		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4256 (99%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.