GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 5570

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5570, which features core speeds of 650 MHz on the GPU, and 900 MHz on the 512 MB of DDR3 RAM. It features 400(80x5) SPUs along with 20 Texture Address Units and 8 ROPs.

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 memory bandwidth, so in theory they should perform the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5570 will be a lot (approximately 132%) better at anisotropic 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 quite a bit (approximately 86%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce GT 420, and also able to handle higher resolutions without slowing down too much. (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 data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

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