GeForce GTS 250 1GB vs GeForce GTX 860M

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 860M, which comes with core clock speeds of 797 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. 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 GTS 250 1GB		145 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (222%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTS 250 1GB should in theory be just a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 860M in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 1GB		70400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 860M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M will be a lot (approximately 62%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		76512 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		47232 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 29280 (62%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 860M should be a small bit (about 8%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTS 250 1GB, and also capable of handling higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 860M		12752 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 1GB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 944 (8%)

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 max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.