Radeon HD 3690/3830 vs Radeon HD 4650 1GB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 4650 1GB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 600 MHz. The GDDR3 memory is set to run at a speed of 700 MHz on this specific card. It features 320(64x5) SPUs along with 32 TAUs and 8 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 4650 1GB		55 Watts
Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3690/3830, in theory, should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 4650 1GB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
Radeon HD 4650 1GB		22400 MB/sec
	Difference: 4096 (18%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 4650 1GB is a lot (about 80%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

Radeon HD 4650 1GB		19200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8512 (80%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 is much (more or less 123%) faster with regards to AA than the Radeon HD 4650 1GB, and able to handle higher screen resolutions without slowing down too much. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 4650 1GB		4800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5888 (123%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.