GeForce 840M vs GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, which makes use of a 65 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 550 MHz. The DDR2 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 500 MHz on this card. It features 96 SPUs along with 48 Texture Address Units and 12 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 840M		30 Watts
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		84 Watts
	Difference: 54 Watts (180%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same memory bandwidth, so theoretically they should have identical performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512 will be just a bit (approximately 7%) better at AF than the GeForce 840M. (explain)

GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		26400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 840M		24696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1704 (7%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 840M will be much (about 25%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 840M		8232 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO ASUS 512		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1632 (25%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.