GeForce GT 420 vs Radeon HD 3650

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3650, which makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR4 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 800 MHz on this particular card. It features 120(24x5) SPUs along with 8 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

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

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GT 420 should be a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3650 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3650 should be a small bit (approximately 4%) more effective at texture 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 superior to the GeForce GT 420, but only just. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. The number is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 number is calculated by multiplying the total 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines 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 output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.