GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 5770

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5770, which has clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 800(160x5) SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
Radeon HD 5770		108 Watts
	Difference: 58 Watts (116%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 5770 should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GT 420 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		76800 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 48000 (167%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5770 will be a lot (more or less 507%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		34000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28400 (507%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5770 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 5770		13600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10800 (386%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the 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 core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.