GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon R9 380 2G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 380 2G, which has core clock speeds of 970 MHz on the GPU, and 1425 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1792 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
Radeon R9 380 2G		190 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (280%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon R9 380 2G should be a lot faster than the GeForce GT 420 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		182400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 153600 (533%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 2G should be a lot (more or less 1840%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		108640 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 103040 (1840%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 2G should be quite a bit (more or less 1009%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 420, and will be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		31040 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28240 (1009%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 max fill rate.