Difference between ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 and NVIDIA GeForce GT 420M graphics cards [closed]

Question

I'm looking to get a new laptop - one of my choices has an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 graphics card, the other a NVIDIA GeForce GT 420M. Could anyone explain the differences between these two types of graphics cards please?

Answer 1

The problem here is that comparing ATi and nVidia is not an easy thing to do as they have quite different architectures and programs (games) are written to exploit their powers differently.

Generally though you don't care about the architectural differences between them (which can be quite vast) and all you will likely want to know is which one is better.

For a quick answer to which is more powerful you can have a look at the technical specifications of each graphics card, but at best these will be very vague (and marketing orientated) ways of telling which is better. The following pages list all the important details of all nVidia and ATI graphics cards, with links out to information on what each part means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units#GeForce_400M_(4xxM)_series

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ati_graphics_processing_units#Mobility_Radeon_HD_5xxx_Series

From those two pages the GT240M claims to have 192 GFLOPs of processing power available while the HD 5650 claims to have upward of 360 GFLOPs.

From that alone I would expect the 5650 to be better, which isn't too surprising as the 420M is a low-range card, the "20" is the placement within the nVidia 4xx series, and the 5650 is a mid-range card, the "650" being the denominator within the ATI 5xxx series.

You may be better off going to http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php and finding your prospective cards and comparing their scores.

GT240M : G3D score: 441, Rank: 230
HD5650M : G3D score: 620, Rank: 161

So it seems that the 5650 is a better card as its score is higher and its rank lower.