GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon R9 270

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon R9 270, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 900 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1400 MHz on this particular card. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
Radeon R9 270		150 Watts
	Difference: 100 Watts (200%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 270 should be much faster than the GeForce GT 420 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 will be much (about 1186%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		72000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 66400 (1186%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 270 will be a lot (approximately 929%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 420, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon R9 270		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 26000 (929%)

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 transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 amount of 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 speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.