Radeon HD 3650 512MB vs Radeon R5 M230

Intro

The Radeon HD 3650 512MB makes use of a 55 nm design. AMD has set the core frequency at 725 MHz. The GDDR3 memory 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 R5 M230, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 780 MHz. The DDR3 memory runs at a speed of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 320 SPUs along with 20 TAUs and 4 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past 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 RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core clock 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 processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.