GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon R9 380 2G

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 380 2G, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 970 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1425 MHz on this card. It features 1792 SPUs as well as 112 TAUs and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
Radeon R9 380 2G		190 Watts
	Difference: 140 Watts (280%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon R9 380 2G should be 533% quicker than the GeForce GT 420 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		182400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 153600 (533%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 2G will be quite a bit (more or less 1840%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		108640 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 103040 (1840%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 380 2G is a lot (about 1009%) better at AA than the GeForce GT 420, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon R9 380 2G		31040 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 28240 (1009%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as 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 - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.