GeForce 9600 GT 512MB vs GeForce GTX 950M

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 950M, which has core clock speeds of 914 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950M		55 Watts
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		95 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (73%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB will be 80% quicker than the GeForce GTX 950M in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		57600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (80%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M will be a lot (more or less 76%) better at AF than the GeForce 9600 GT 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		20800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 15760 (76%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 950M is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		14624 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB		10400 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4224 (41%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.