GeForce GTS 150 vs GeForce GTX 850M

Intro

Compare all that to the GeForce GTX 850M, which features a clock frequency of 876 MHz and a DDR3 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 850M		40 Watts
GeForce GTS 150		141 Watts
	Difference: 101 Watts (253%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have exactly the same bandwidth, so in theory they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 150 should be a lot (approximately 35%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 850M. (explain)

GeForce GTS 150		47360 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 850M		35040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12320 (35%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 850M is superior to the GeForce GTS 150, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce GTX 850M		14016 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 150		11840 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2176 (18%)

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 data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.