GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB, which has core speeds of 825 MHz on the GPU, and 1126 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GT 420 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		144128 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 115328 (400%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB should be a lot (more or less 371%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 20800 (371%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB is superior to the GeForce GT 420, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB		26400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 23600 (843%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.