GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 3650 512MB

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 3650 512MB, which features clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 800 MHz on the 512 MB of GDDR3 memory. 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)

Radeon HD 3650 512MB		78 Watts
GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
	Difference: 28 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTS 450 should theoretically be quite a bit faster than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 32128 (126%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTS 450 will be much (about 332%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB. (explain)

GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 19256 (332%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution 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 512MB		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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's 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 can be processed per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). 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 potential to reach the max fill rate.