GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB vs GeForce GTX 950M

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 950M, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 914 MHz. The DDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific card. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950M		55 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		84 Watts
	Difference: 29 Watts (53%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB should in theory be a small bit faster than the GeForce GTX 950M in general. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		38400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M will be a lot (about 38%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 384MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10160 (38%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution 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 GSO 384MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8024 (122%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out 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 higher the bandwidth is, 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 applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at 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 card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.