GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 3650

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GTS comes with a GPU core clock speed of 675 MHz, and the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM is set to run at 1000 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 32 Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 3650, which comes with a clock frequency of 725 MHz and a GDDR4 memory speed of 800 MHz. It also uses a 128-bit bus, and makes use of a 55 nm design. It is made up of 120(24x5) SPUs, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses 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 can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.