GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon R9 290

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 290, which comes with clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2560 SPUs along with 160 TAUs and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
Radeon R9 290		300 Watts
	Difference: 250 Watts (500%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 290 should be 1011% faster than the GeForce GT 420 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		320000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 291200 (1011%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 is a lot (approximately 2186%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		128000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 122400 (2186%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 290 should be a lot (approximately 1729%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 420, and also able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 290		51200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48400 (1729%)

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 maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.