GeForce 820M vs GeForce 8500 GT

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce 8500 GT, which makes use of a 80 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 450 MHz. The DDR2 memory is set to run at a speed of 400 MHz on this particular model. It features 16 SPUs along with 8 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 820M		15 Watts
GeForce 8500 GT		45 Watts
	Difference: 30 Watts (200%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 820M should be 25% faster than the GeForce 8500 GT in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce 820M		16000 MB/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 820M should be much (about 220%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8500 GT. (explain)

GeForce 820M		11504 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		3600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7904 (220%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 820M will be much (more or less 60%) better at FSAA than the GeForce 8500 GT, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

GeForce 820M		2876 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8500 GT		1800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1076 (60%)

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

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, 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 that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.