GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) vs GeForce 940M

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce 940M, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 1072 MHz. The DDR3 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 940M should be 25% faster than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM) overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce 940M		16000 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 940M should be a lot (more or less 198%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GS (OEM). (explain)

GeForce 940M		25728 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17088 (198%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 940M is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 940M		8576 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GS (OEM)		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4256 (99%)

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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.