GeForce GT 340 vs GeForce GT 420

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GT 420, which uses a 40 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 700 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM runs at a speed of 900 MHz on this particular card. 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 420		50 Watts
GeForce GT 340		69 Watts
	Difference: 19 Watts (38%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GT 340 will be 89% faster than the GeForce GT 420 overall, because of its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GT 340		54400 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 25600 (89%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 340 will be much (more or less 214%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

GeForce GT 340		17600 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 12000 (214%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GT 340 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GT 340		4400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (57%)

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 largest amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum 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 speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units 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 lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.