GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 3650

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 3650, which features core speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR4 RAM. It features 120(24x5) SPUs along with 8 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3650		78 Watts
GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
	Difference: 28 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTS 450 should be a lot faster than the Radeon HD 3650 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 32128 (126%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 is quite a bit (more or less 332%) better at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3650. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19256 (332%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTS 450 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3650		2900 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 9628 (332%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This is worked out by multiplying the total texture units 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can 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 Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.