GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon R5 M255

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R5 M255, which features core clock speeds of 940 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GT 420 should perform much faster than the Radeon R5 M255 overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
Radeon R5 M255		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (80%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R5 M255 will be quite a bit (more or less 236%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		18800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 13200 (236%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R5 M255 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R5 M255		7520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4720 (169%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number 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 handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. 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 fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.