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

Intro

Compare all 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 Rasterization Operator Units.

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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 3650 512MB should in theory be a little bit better 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 should be quite a bit (approximately 49%) more effective at anisotropic filtering 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 using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 is superior to the Radeon HD 3650 512MB, by a large margin. (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.