GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 5570

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5570, which has a clock frequency of 650 MHz and a DDR3 memory frequency of 900 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 40 nm design. It is made up of 400(80x5) SPUs, 20 TAUs, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 5570		43 Watts
GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
	Difference: 7 Watts (16%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so in theory they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5570 should be much (approximately 132%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		13000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 7400 (132%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5570 will be a lot (about 86%) faster with regards to anti-aliasing than the GeForce GT 420, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 5570		5200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (86%)

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 information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied 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 better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.