GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 3650 512MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3650 512MB, which comes with GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 512 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 800 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 120(24x5) Stream Processors, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		78 Watts
	Difference: 28 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GT 420 should perform a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3650 512MB will be just a bit (more or less 4%) better at AF than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon HD 3650 512MB		5800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 200 (4%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3650 512MB should be just a bit (about 4%) more effective at AA than the GeForce GT 420, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

Radeon HD 3650 512MB		2900 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 100 (4%)

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 megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number 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 video 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.