Radeon HD 3470 512MB vs Radeon HD 3650 256MB

Intro

The Radeon HD 3470 512MB makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 800 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a frequency of 950 MHz on this particular model. It features 40(8x5) SPUs as well as 4 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3650 256MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The DDR2 memory works at a speed of 800 MHz on this card. It features 120(24x5) SPUs along with 8 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a 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 better the bandwidth is, 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also 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, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.