GeForce GTX 260 vs GeForce GTX 850M

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 850M, which features a GPU core clock speed of 876 MHz, and 2048 MB of DDR3 memory running at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
GeForce GTX 260		182 Watts
	Difference: 142 Watts (355%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 260 will be 250% quicker than the GeForce GTX 850M in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		111888 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		32000 MB/sec
	Difference: 79888 (250%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 260 should be just a bit (about 5%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 850M. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		36864 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1824 (5%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 260 is a little bit (more or less 15%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 850M, and should be able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 260		16128 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2112 (15%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends 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.