GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 vs Radeon HD 3650 512MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3650 512MB, which comes with 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 GT 512MB GDDR3		47 Watts
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		78 Watts
	Difference: 31 Watts (66%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3650 512MB should in theory be a little bit faster than the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 3650 512MB		25600 MB/sec
GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		22400 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (14%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 will be much (more or less 49%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		8640 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 2840 (49%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 is superior to the Radeon HD 3650 512MB, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3		4320 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		2900 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1420 (49%)

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 max amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.