GeForce 9800 GX2 vs GeForce GTX 860M

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 860M, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 797 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this model. It features 1152 SPUs along with 96 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 860M		45 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 152 Watts (338%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should theoretically perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 860M in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64000 (100%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 will be a little bit (about 0%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 860M. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 288 (0%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 should be a lot (approximately 51%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 860M, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6448 (51%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video 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 most pixels the graphics 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 number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.