GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon R9 M380

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M380, which comes with core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1500 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 640 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M380 should in theory perform much faster than the GeForce GT 420 overall. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		96000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 67200 (233%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 is a lot (more or less 614%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		40000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34400 (614%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M380 will be a lot (more or less 471%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 420, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M380		16000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 13200 (471%)

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 transported over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better 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 per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.