GeForce GT 430 vs Radeon HD 3650 512MB

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3650 512MB, which comes with core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 120(24x5) SPUs as well as 8 Texture Address Units and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430		60 Watts
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		78 Watts
	Difference: 18 Watts (30%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GT 430 should theoretically be a small bit better than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GT 430		28800 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 430 is much (approximately 93%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GT 430		11200 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 5400 (93%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 3650 512MB is the winner, though only just barely. (explain)

Radeon HD 3650 512MB		2900 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430		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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs 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 fill rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.