GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB vs GeForce GTX 950M

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 950M, which comes with core 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 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 950M		55 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		84 Watts
	Difference: 29 Watts (53%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB should perform a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 950M in general. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		38400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 950M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (20%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M is a lot (approximately 38%) better at AF than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		36560 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10160 (38%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 950M will be much (approximately 122%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 950M		14624 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.