GeForce GT 1030 vs GeForce GT 420

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GT 420, which has core clock speeds of 700 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 48 SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 1030		30 Watts
GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GT 1030 should in theory be much superior to the GeForce GT 420 in general. (explain)

GeForce GT 1030		49152 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 20352 (71%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 1030 is quite a bit (about 623%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

GeForce GT 1030		40480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34880 (623%)

Pixel Rate

If running with lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GT 1030 is superior to the GeForce GT 420, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GT 1030		20240 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 17440 (623%)

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 (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, 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 worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

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