GeForce 825M vs GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2, which comes with a clock speed of 540 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 400 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and uses a 80 nm design. It is made up of 32 SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 825M		33 Watts
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		47 Watts
	Difference: 14 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 825M will be 13% faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2 overall, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce 825M		14400 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 825M should be quite a bit (about 57%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2. (explain)

GeForce 825M		13600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		8640 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4960 (57%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 825M is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 825M		6800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 1GB DDR2		4320 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2480 (57%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be 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 higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a 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 called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.