GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 vs GeForce GT 420

Intro

The GeForce GT 240 GDDR5 makes use of a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 550 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 850 MHz on this particular card. It features 96 SPUs as well as 32 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all of that to the GeForce GT 420, which has a clock frequency of 700 MHz and a GDDR3 memory frequency of 900 MHz. It also features a 128-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 48 SPUs, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 Raster Operation Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units 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 a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number 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 worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.