GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 3650 256MB

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3650 256MB, which has GPU clock speed of 725 MHz, and 256 MB of DDR2 memory set to run at 800 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also features 120(24x5) SPUs, 8 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 420		50 Watts
Radeon HD 3650 256MB		78 Watts
	Difference: 28 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GT 420 should in theory perform just a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3650 256MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 420		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650 256MB		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (13%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3650 256MB is a bit (approximately 4%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

Radeon HD 3650 256MB		5800 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GT 420		5600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 200 (4%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3650 256MB is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3650 256MB		2900 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 420		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 100 (4%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

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