Radeon HD 3650 vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon R9 M290X, which uses a 28 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 850 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a frequency of 1200 MHz on this specific card. It features 1280 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3650		78 Watts
Radeon R9 M290X		100 Watts
	Difference: 22 Watts (28%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 M290X should in theory be much faster than the Radeon HD 3650 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (500%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be quite a bit (about 1072%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3650. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62200 (1072%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 M290X is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3650		2900 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 24300 (838%)

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 max amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

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