GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 5450

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5450, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 650 MHz. The DDR3 memory works at a speed of 800 MHz on this particular card. It features 80(16x5) 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)

Radeon HD 5450		19 Watts
GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (163%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GT 420 is 125% faster than the Radeon HD 5450 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5450		12800 MB/sec
	Difference: 16000 (125%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 420 will be a small bit (about 8%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 5450. (explain)

GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		5200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 400 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GT 420 is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5450		2600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 200 (8%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.