GeForce 820M vs GeForce 840M

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce 840M, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 1029 MHz. The DDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this specific model. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce 840M		1600 points
GeForce 820M		850 points
	Difference: 750 (88%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 820M		15 Watts
GeForce 840M		30 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (100%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so in theory they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 840M should be quite a bit (more or less 115%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce 820M. (explain)

GeForce 840M		24696 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 820M		11504 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13192 (115%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 840M is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 840M		8232 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 820M		2876 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5356 (186%)

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 information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at 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 in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.