Radeon HD 3650 512MB vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which has core speeds of 668 MHz on the GPU, and 828 MHz on the 256 MB of GDDR3 RAM. It features 320(64x5) SPUs as well as 16 Texture Address Units and 16 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		78 Watts
	Difference: 3 Watts (4%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 should theoretically perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		25600 MB/sec
	Difference: 896 (4%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 will be quite a bit (approximately 84%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		5800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 4888 (84%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 3690/3830 is quite a bit (about 269%) more effective at FSAA than the Radeon HD 3650 512MB, and also able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3650 512MB		2900 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7788 (269%)

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 largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.