GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 6950 2GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6950 2GB, which comes with core clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1408 SPUs along with 88 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
Radeon HD 6950 2GB		200 Watts
	Difference: 150 Watts (300%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 2GB should perform a lot faster than the GeForce GT 420 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 131200 (456%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 2GB will be a lot (about 1157%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		70400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 64800 (1157%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6950 2GB is superior to the GeForce GT 420, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950 2GB		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22800 (814%)

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 information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better 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 applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.