ATI Radeon HD 3650 GDDR3 vs Sapphire Radeon X800 GT 256MB DDR3

Having 4 times as many ROPs helps the Radeon X800 GT 256MB DDR3 card to offer significantly higher pixel fill rate, even though its graphics frequency is lower. Having better pixel fillrate allows the graphics card to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

Another important factor, that influences overall graphics card performance, is texture fillrate. This parameter is calculated as the number of TMUs (Texture Mapping Units), multiplied by graphics clock speed. Because both GPUs have the same number of Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) and the ATI Radeon HD 3650 GDDR3 is clocked considerably higher, its texture fillrate is substantially higher. Having better maximum texture fill rate allows the graphics card to use more sophisticated 3D effects and/or map more textures to each texel, which improves visual appearance of games and generated images.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the graphics card to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. The bandwidth depends on several components, like memory type, speed, and memory interface width. Specifically, the Radeon X800 GT 256MB DDR3 GPU offers wider memory bus. As a result, it has higher memory bandwidth.