Radeon HD 3650 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950, which comes with GPU core speed of 800 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory running at 1250 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is made up of 1408 SPUs, 88 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3650		78 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 122 Watts (156%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6950 is 525% faster than the Radeon HD 3650 in general, because of its higher data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 134400 (525%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be much (more or less 1114%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3650. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 64600 (1114%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 will be a lot (approximately 783%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3650, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3650		2900 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 22700 (783%)

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 max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 number of 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 the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.