Radeon HD 3650 256MB vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

The Radeon HD 3650 256MB uses a 55 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 725 MHz. The DDR2 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 800 MHz on this particular card. It features 120(24x5) SPUs along with 8 Texture Address Units and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 270X, which comes with a core clock frequency of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1400 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.