GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 3650

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3650, which uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR4 RAM runs at a frequency of 800 MHz on this card. It features 120(24x5) SPUs as well as 8 TAUs and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

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

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GT 420 should be 13% quicker than the Radeon HD 3650 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3650 will be a small bit (approximately 4%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GT 420. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3650 is the winner, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 3650		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 maximum amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster 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 per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.