GeForce 8600 GTS vs Radeon HD 3650

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GTS uses a 80 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 675 MHz. The GDDR3 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 32 SPUs as well as 16 TAUs and 8 Rasterization Operator Units.

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

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 processed in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core clock 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.