GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 3850 1GB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3850 1GB, which has clock speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR3 memory. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 16 TAUs 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 3850 1GB		75 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (50%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 3850 1GB should be 84% faster than the GeForce GT 420 overall, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		52992 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 24192 (84%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 1GB should be quite a bit (about 91%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5088 (91%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3850 1GB is much (approximately 282%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GT 420, and also should be able to handle higher screen resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3850 1GB		10688 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7888 (282%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is worked out 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 texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per 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 - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.