GeForce GTS 250 512MB vs GeForce GTX 960M

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 960M, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1096 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1000 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 640 SPUs, 40 Texture Address Units, and 16 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960M		65 Watts
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		145 Watts
	Difference: 80 Watts (123%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTS 250 512MB should theoretically be a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 960M in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		70400 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		64000 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (10%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 250 512MB will be a bit (approximately 8%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 960M. (explain)

GeForce GTS 250 512MB		47232 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960M		43840 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3392 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960M is superior to the GeForce GTS 250 512MB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960M		17536 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 250 512MB		11808 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5728 (49%)

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 transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.