Radeon HD 3650 vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7870, which has a clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3650		78 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 97 Watts (124%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 will be 500% faster than the Radeon HD 3650 in general, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (500%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 will be much (approximately 1279%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3650. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 74200 (1279%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7870 should be quite a bit (more or less 1003%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3650, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3650		2900 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 29100 (1003%)

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 transported over the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher 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 that the graphics chip could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs 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, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.