GeForce 820M vs GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, which comes with GPU clock speed of 550 MHz, and 512 MB of DDR2 RAM set to run at 500 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 96 Stream Processors, 48 TAUs, and 12 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 820M		15 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		84 Watts
	Difference: 69 Watts (460%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same memory bandwidth, so in theory they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 is much (more or less 129%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 820M. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 820M		11504 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 14896 (129%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 should be quite a bit (about 129%) faster with regards to FSAA than the GeForce 820M, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 820M		2876 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3724 (129%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one 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 the texel rate, 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock 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 fill 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 reach the max fill rate.