GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 M380, which comes with core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 640 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 M380 should perform much faster than the GeForce GT 420 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 67200 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 should be much (about 614%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34400 (614%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 will be quite a bit (more or less 471%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 420, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13200 (471%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.