GeForce GT 420 vs GeForce GT 440 3GB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GT 440 3GB, which comes with clock speeds of 594 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 144 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
GeForce GT 440 3GB		56 Watts
	Difference: 6 Watts (12%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GT 440 3GB should be much faster than the GeForce GT 420 overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		43200 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 14400 (50%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 440 3GB should be much (about 155%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8656 (155%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GT 440 3GB is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GT 440 3GB		14256 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 11456 (409%)

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 (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.