GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3 vs Radeon HD 3650 256MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3650 256MB, which comes with clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 256 MB of DDR2 memory. It features 120(24x5) SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3		50 Watts
Radeon HD 3650 256MB		78 Watts
	Difference: 28 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

Both cards have the exact same bandwidth, so theoretically they should perform exactly the same. (explain)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3 should be a lot (approximately 52%) better at AF than the Radeon HD 3650 256MB. (explain)

GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3		8800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 256MB		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 3000 (52%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3 is a better choice, by far. (explain)

GeForce 9500 GT 512MB GDDR3		4400 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 256MB		2900 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1500 (52%)

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 largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 the video card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.