GeForce 840M vs GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2, which makes use of a 80 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 540 MHz. The DDR2 memory works at a frequency of 400 MHz on this particular model. It features 32 SPUs along with 16 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 840M		30 Watts
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		47 Watts
	Difference: 17 Watts (57%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 840M should in theory be a lot faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 in general. (explain)

GeForce 840M		16000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 840M will be much (approximately 186%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2. (explain)

GeForce 840M		24696 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16056 (186%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 840M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 840M		8232 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3912 (91%)

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 data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.