GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5450, which features core clock speeds of 650 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR3 memory. It features 80(16x5) SPUs along with 8 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (163%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 420, in theory, should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 5450 in general. (explain)

GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 420 should be a bit (about 8%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 400 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GT 420 is a better choice, though not by far. (explain)

GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 200 (8%)

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 data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount 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 outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.