GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon R7 240

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 240, which features clock speeds of 730 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 2048 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon R7 240		30 Watts
GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so in theory they should have the same performance. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 240 is quite a bit (approximately 161%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		14600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 9000 (161%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R7 240 is a lot (more or less 109%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GT 420, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R7 240		5840 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 3040 (109%)

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 max amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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