GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6950, which has core speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (300%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 6950 should perform much faster than the GeForce GT 420 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 131200 (456%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 is quite a bit (more or less 1157%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 64800 (1157%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be quite a bit (more or less 814%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 420, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22800 (814%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write 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 core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.