GeForce 9800 GT 1GB vs GeForce GTX 960M

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 960M, which has core speeds of 1096 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		105 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (62%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 960M should be 11% faster than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB in general, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		57600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 960M will be quite a bit (approximately 30%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GT 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 10240 (30%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GT 1GB		9600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7936 (83%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the 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 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 ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.