GeForce GT 430 1GB vs GeForce GTX 850M

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 850M, which has clock speeds of 876 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 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
GeForce GT 430 1GB		60 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 850M should be a small bit faster than the GeForce GT 430 1GB in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 850M is much (about 213%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 430 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		11200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23840 (213%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 850M is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 1GB		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11216 (401%)

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 (counted in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated 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 card will be at handling 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 the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.