GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 240, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 730 MHz. The DDR3 memory works at a speed of 900 MHz on this model. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 240 will be much (more or less 161%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9000 (161%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R7 240 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3040 (109%)

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 MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should 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, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at 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 the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. 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 output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.