GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB vs GeForce GTX 960M

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 960M, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1096 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		84 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (29%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 960M should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (67%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M will be a lot (approximately 66%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17440 (66%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 1.5GB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10936 (166%)

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 max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.