GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 3650 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3650 512MB, which has clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 120(24x5) SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		78 Watts
	Difference: 3 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce 8600 GTS should in theory be much better than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 6400 (25%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GTS will be much (more or less 86%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5000 (86%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GTS should be much (about 86%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB, and capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		2900 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2500 (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: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the 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 maximum amount of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of 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 is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.