GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon R7 M260

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R7 M260, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 715 MHz. The DDR3 memory works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular card. It features 384 SPUs along with 24 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GT 420 should perform much faster than the Radeon R7 M260 in general. (explain)

GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
Radeon R7 M260		16000 MB/sec
	Difference: 12800 (80%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R7 M260 will be much (approximately 206%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		17160 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 11560 (206%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon R7 M260 is superior to the GeForce GT 420, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R7 M260		5720 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2920 (104%)

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 maximum amount of data (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.