GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 4730

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 4730, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 700 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 900 MHz on this specific model. It features 640(128x5) SPUs along with 32 Texture Address Units and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
Radeon HD 4730		140 Watts
	Difference: 90 Watts (180%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 4730 should in theory be much faster than the GeForce GT 420 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 4730		57600 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 28800 (100%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4730 should be quite a bit (approximately 300%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon HD 4730		22400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 16800 (300%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 4730 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 4730		5600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2800 (100%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses 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 high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour 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 is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.