GeForce 9800 GX2 vs Radeon HD 3650 512MB

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3650 512MB, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR3 memory works at a speed of 800 MHz on this card. It features 120(24x5) SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3650 512MB		78 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 119 Watts (153%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the GeForce 9800 GX2 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the Radeon HD 3650 512MB in general. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 102400 (400%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce 9800 GX2 is a lot (more or less 1224%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 71000 (1224%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce 9800 GX2 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		2900 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16300 (562%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.