Radeon HD 3650 256MB vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6970, which comes with core clock speeds of 880 MHz on the GPU, and 1375 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3650 256MB		78 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 172 Watts (221%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3650 256MB overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650 256MB		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 150400 (588%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be quite a bit (more or less 1357%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3650 256MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 256MB		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 78680 (1357%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be much (about 871%) more effective at AA than the Radeon HD 3650 256MB, and will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 256MB		2900 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 25260 (871%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card 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 per second.

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