Radeon HD 3650 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5970, which has core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1600 SPUs along with 160 Texture Address Units and 64 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3650		78 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 216 Watts (277%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically be much faster than the Radeon HD 3650 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 230400 (900%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 is a lot (approximately 3900%) faster with regards to AF than the Radeon HD 3650. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 226200 (3900%)

Pixel Rate

If using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5970 is superior to the Radeon HD 3650, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3650		2900 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 89900 (3100%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.