GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which has a clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1000 MHz. It also features a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is comprised of 1440(288x5) SPUs, 72 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 101 Watts (202%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 5850 should be 344% faster than the GeForce GT 420 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 99200 (344%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 is much (approximately 832%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 46600 (832%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be a lot (more or less 729%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 420, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 20400 (729%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must 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, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.