GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 270X, which comes with a clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1400 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
	Difference: 130 Watts (260%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the Radeon R9 270X should theoretically be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GT 420 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 150400 (522%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X should be a lot (more or less 1329%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 74400 (1329%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270X is superior to the GeForce GT 420, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29200 (1043%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once 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 high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.