GeForce 930M vs GeForce 9400 GT 256MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB, which makes use of a 65 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 550 MHz. The GDDR2 RAM works at a speed of 400 MHz on this card. It features 16 SPUs as well as 8 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce 930M should theoretically be a small bit superior to the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB in general. (explain)

GeForce 930M		14400 MB/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 1600 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 930M is a lot (more or less 406%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB. (explain)

GeForce 930M		22272 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		4400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 17872 (406%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 930M should be much (more or less 237%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce 9400 GT 256MB, and should be able to handle higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce 930M		7424 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9400 GT 256MB		2200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5224 (237%)

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 max amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number 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 fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.