Radeon HD 3650 512MB vs Radeon R9 M290X

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon R9 M290X, which has clock speeds of 850 MHz on the GPU, and 1200 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 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 512MB		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 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		153600 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 128000 (500%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X is a lot (more or less 1072%) more effective at AF than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		68000 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 62200 (1072%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon R9 M290X should be much (about 838%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB, and also will be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon R9 M290X		27200 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.