When AMD launched the RV670 GPU at the heart of the ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850 series of products, they received quite a bit of fanfare due to the product's  competitive prices, strong performance, and more manageable power profiles.  One of the main reasons AMD was able to bring the Radeon HD 3870 and 3850 to market with these attributes was because the company had migrated their GPUs to a relatively more advanced 55nm process technology.  Manufacturing the GPUs at 55nm meant they were more economical to produce, required less power than the previous generation, and could run at higher clock speeds.

AMD didn’t stop there, however.  They have since taken the very same design principles that brought forth the RV670 and used them for a couple of new mainstream and entry-level GPUs.  Today AMD is officially unveiling the Radeon HD 3650 and the Radeon HD 3450 / 3470, which are based on the 55nm RV635 and RV620 GPUs, respectively.  Like the RV670 that came before them, the RV635 and RV620 are competitively priced DirectX 10.1 compliant GPUs that offer full UVD support.

We’ve got the top of the line Radeon HD 3650 in house and have put it through the wringer with some of today’s hottest games and video tests.  Read on to see just how AMD’s new sub-$100 mainstream graphics card performed in our battery of tests...

ATI Radeon HD 3650

ATI Radeon HD 3650 Features & Specifications

We have previously posted a wealth of information related to today's launch that we recommend you read to get familiar with AMD's new ATI RV635 and RV620 GPUs, their previous GPU architectures, and their key features. The Radeon HD 3650 and 3450 / 3470 are based on a GPU derived from of the R600, and as such they have a number of key features in common that we've already covered in much greater detail that we will here today. The articles we suggest you peruse include:

• ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850: 55nm RV670
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 and 2400 Series
• ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT: The R600 Has Arrived  
• Radeon X1950 Pro with Native CrossFire
• AMD & ATI Merger: Questions and Answers
• ATI Crossfire Multi-GPU Technology Preview

If you haven't already done so, we recommend scanning through our 3800 and 2x00 series coverage, our Radeon HD 2900 XT launch article, and the Radeon X1950 Pro with Native CrossFire article. In those four pieces, we cover a large number of the features offered by the new Radeon HD 3600 and 3400 series of cards and explain many of the features of DirectX 10. We recommended reading these articles because there is quite a bit of background information in them that'll make it easier to fully understand what we're going to showcase here today.

In comparison to many other graphics cards on the market currently, the Radon HD 3650 is quite small.  The PCB itself extends barely .5” from the rear of a PCI Express expansion slot and it is no higher than its retention plate.   It’s clear just by looking at the card, however, that this is an ATI-built graphics card.

    


    


    
The Radeon HD 3650 Exposed

As you can see, the Radeon HD 3650 has a small, single-slot active cooler and Ruby is confident that her antiperspirant is doing its job.  The board features a pair of CrossFire edge connectors along the top edge of its PCB, and dual, dual-link DVI outputs along with a single HDTV / S-Video output.  We should also note that the Radeon 3650 supports audio over HDMI as well using a supplied adapter.

If we pull off the cooler, the diminutive RV635 GPU is visible.  The die is tiny by today’s standards at about 12mm x 11mm, which is a fraction the size of a U.S. dime.  AMD should be able to churn these out by the truckload.

The Radeon HD 3650 features 120 stream processors, 8 texture units, 4 ROPs, and a 128-bit interface to its on-board frame buffer.  If you look at the full list of specifications above, you’ll notice memory clock speed has multiple entries though.  That’s because there is more than one Radeon HD 3650 launching today.  The card we tested, and what you see pictured above, is a 256MB model with 1.6GHz GDDR3 memory and a 725MHz GPU.  DDR2-equipped Radeon HD 3650’s with varying amounts of on-board memory ranging from 256MB to 1GB, however, are also being introduced, with lower memory clock speeds but the same GPU speed.

As we mentioned in our introduction, the Radeon 3400 series of cards is launching today as well.  The Radeon HD 3450 and 3470 feature 40 stream processors, 4 texture units, 4 ROPs, and UVD.  Memory and GPU frequencies and the output port configuration will vary from card to card.

     
The Radeon HD 3400 Family of Cards

Half and full-height Radeon HD 3400 series cards will be available almost immediately.  A version with a passive cooling solution is also planned.  Finally, we should point out that the Radeon HD 3600 and 3400 series of cards are the first to feature two integrated DisplayPort outputs, although not every board will feature the necessary connector.

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEMS: We tested all of the graphics cards used in this article on either an EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard (NVIDIA GPUs) or an Asus P5E3 Deluxe (ATI GPUs) powered by a Core 2 Extreme QX6850 quad-core processor and 2GB of low-latency Corsair RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test systems was enter their respective BIOSes and set all values to their "optimized" or "performance" default settings. Then we manually configured the memory timings and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS, and installed the latest DX10 redist and various hotfixes along with the necessary drivers and applications.

The HotHardware Test System Core 2 Extreme Powered

Processor - Motherboard - Video Cards - Memory - Audio - Hard Drive -

Hardware Used: Core 2 Extreme QX6850 (3GHz)  EVGA nForce 680i SLI nForce 680i SLI chipset Asus P5E3 Deluxe X38 Express  ATI Radeon HD 3650 GeForce 8600 GTS Radeon HD 3850 Radeon HD 2600 XT 2048MB Corsair PC2-6400C3 2 X 1GB 2048MB Corsair DDR3-1333 C7 2 X 1GB Integrated on board Western Digital "Raptor" 74GB - 10,000RPM - SATA

OS -  DirectX - Video Drivers - Synthetic (DX) - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - DirectX - OpenGL -

Relevant Software: Windows Vista Ultimate DirectX 10 NVIDIA Forceware v169.09 ATI Catalyst v8.1 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark06 v1.0.2 Company of Heros - DX10 Crysis - DX10 Half Life 2: Episode 2* Enemy Territory: Quake Wars* * - Custom Test (HH Exclusive demo)

Performance Comparisons with 3DMark06 v1.0.2 Details: www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark06

3DMark06

3DMark06 is the most recent addition to the 3DMark franchise. This version differs from 3Dmark05 in a number of ways, and includes not only Shader Model 2.0 tests, but Shader Model 3.0 and HDR tests as well. Some of the assets from 3DMark05 have been re-used, but the scenes are now rendered with much more geometric detail and the shader complexity is vastly increased as well. Max shader length in 3DMark05 was 96 instructions, while 3DMark06 ups that number to 512. 3DMark06 also employs much more lighting and there is extensive use of soft shadows. With 3DMark06, Futuremark has also updated how the final score is tabulated. In this latest version of the benchmark, SM 2.0 and HDR / SM3.0 tests are weighted and the CPU score is factored into the final tally as well.

According to 3DMark06's default benchmark, the new Radeon HD 3650 finishes just behind the Radeon HD 2600 XT.  The more expensive, and more powerful Radeon HD 3850 doubles the 3650's performance, and the GeForce 8600 GTS outpaces it by about 1800 points.

If we drill down and look at 3DMark06's individual results, we see how the Radeon HD 3650 fared in the shader model 2.0 and shader model 3.0 / HDR tests.  Once again, the new Radeon finishes just behind the 2600 XT regardless of which shader model is used.

 

Performance Comparisons with Half-Life 2: Episode 2 Details: www.half-life2.com

Half Life 2: Episode 2

Thanks to the dedication of hardcore PC gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time.  And thanks to an updated game engine, gorgeous visual, and intelligent weapon and level design, Half Life 2 became just as popular.  Episode 2 offers a number of visual enhancements including better looking transparent texture anti-aliasing. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024, 1,600 x 1,200 and 1,920 x 1,200 with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.  Color correction and HDR rendering were also enabled in the game engine as well.  We used a custom recorded timedemo file to benchmark all cards in this test.

Despite what 3DMark06 reported, the new Radeon HD 3650 outpaced the Radeon 2600 XT in our custom Half Life 2: Episode 2 benchmark.  It still wasn't quiet powerful enough to catch the higher powered 3850 or 8800 GTS, but the Radeon HD 3650 is no slouch for a sub-$100 graphics card.

Performance Comparisons with Company of Heroes Details: www.companyofheroesgame.com

Company of Heroes

Relic Entertainment's World War II era real-time strategy game Company of Heroes was originally released as a DirectX 9 title for Windows.  But recent upates to the game have incorporated support for new DirectX 10 features that improve image quality and enhance the game's finer graphical details.  The game features a built-in performance test which which we used to attain the results below. Our Company of Heroes tests were run at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024, 1,600 x 1,200 and 1920 x 1200 with 4X anti-aliasing and all of the game's image-quality related options set to their maximum values.

The results from the built-in Company of Heroes benchmark somewhat mirror those of 3DMark06.  Here, the new Radeon HD 3650 just misses the mark set by the Radeon HD 2600 XT.  At the ultra high-quality graphics settings we used, however, all of the cards tested struggle quite a bit in this benchmark.

Performance Comparisons with ET: Quake Wars Details: www.enemyterritory.com

Enemy Territory:  Quake Wars

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is Based on id's radically enhanced Doom 3 engine and viewed by many as Battlefield 2 meets the Strogg, and then some.  In fact, we'd venture to say that id took EA's team-based warfare genre up a notch or two.  ET: Quake Wars also marks the introduction of John Carmack's "Megatexture" technology that employs extremely large environment and terrain textures that cover vast areas of maps without the need to repeat and tile many small textures.  The beauty of megatexture technology is that each unit only takes up a maximum of 8MB of frame buffer memory.  Add to that HDR-like bloom lighting and leading edge shadowing effects and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars looks great, plays well and works high end graphics cards vigorously.  The game was tested with all of its in-game options set to their maximum values with soft particles enabled in addition to 4X anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

The pattern continued in our custom Enemy Territory: Quake Wars benchmark.  Once again, the new Radeon HD 3650 finished slightly behind the Radeon HD 2600 XT, and the GeForce 8800 GTS and Radeon HD 3850 were far out in front.

Performance Comparisons with Crysis Details: www.ea.com/crysis

Crysis

If you're at all into enthusiast computing, the highly anticipated single player demo of the hot, new, upcoming FPS smash-hit Crysis, should require no introduction. Crytek's game engine visuals are easily the most impressive real-time 3D renderings we've seen on the computer screen to date.  The engine employs some of the latest techniques in 3D rendering like Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Subsurface Scattering, Motion Blur and Depth-of-Field effects, as well as some of the most impressive use of Shader technology we've seen yet.  In short, for those of you that want to skip the technical jib-jab, Crysis is HOT.  We ran the SP demo with all of the game's visual options set to 'High' to put a significant load on the graphics cards being tested.

Crysis pounded all of the cards we tested into oblivion, but the pattern we witnessed with EP2 reemerged.  In the Crysis benchmark, the Radeon HD 3650 was able to sneak passed the Radeon HD 2600 XT and was even managed to beat out the GeForce 8800 GTS at the lowest resolution.

Before we bring this article to a close, we'd like to cover a few final data points. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test system was consuming using a power meter and also took some notes regarding its noise output. Our goal was to give you all an idea as to how much power each configuration used and to explain how loud the configurations were under load. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the video cards alone.
  

Total System Power Consumption & Acoustics It's All About the Watts and Decibels

In terms of peak and idle power consumption, the new Radeon HD 3650 is a clear performance-per-watt champion.  Throughout our benchmarks, the Radeon HD 3650 performed about on par with, or slightly better, than the Radeon HD 2600 XT.  Despite offering similar performance, however, the new card consumed 10 fewer watts while running under a full 3D workload.  On top of that, the 3650 doesn't require a supplimental power connector and its PCB is significantly smaller.  We can see why AMD has high hopes for this card.

As for the 3650's acoustic profile, we'd definitly consider it quiet, but not silent.  The cooler's fan emits a somewhat high-pitched whine, albiet at a low volume, during normal use.  We would not consider the card loud by any means, but we could see a discerning HTPC user being distracted by the cooler's report.  In that case, the passive 3450 would obviously be the better choice.

Performance Summary: Considering its sub-$100 projected price point, the Radeon HD 3650 performed well throughout testing.  The previous generation Radeon HD 2600 XT is available for about $110 to $170 on-line depending on its memory configuration.  Despite having a lower price and consuming less power, the new Radeon HD 3650 was able to outpace the 2600 XT in a couple of benchmarks (HL2: EP2 and Crysis), and where the 2600 XT pulled ahead it wasn’t by a significant margin.  Video playback performance also proved to be a strong point for the Radeon HD 3650.

It’s clear to us that AMD is out to produce a solid line-up of graphics cards at a number of price points, that also happen to be economical to manufacture.  The new Radeon HD 3600 series doesn’t tear through any gaming benchmarks, but it does have a very complete feature set (DirectX 10.1, UVD, DisplayPort, CrossFireX), a low price, and it sips power in comparison to most of the other graphics cards currently on the market.

The bottom line is if you’re looking for a relatively inexpensive upgrade from integrated graphics or want an affordable graphics card for casual gaming that excels at video playback quality and CPU offload performance, the Radeon HD 3650 is a fine choice.  And although we didn’t have a chance to test the new 3400 series for this article, we suspect they too will be strong products at their respective price points.

Competitive Price DX 10.1 Support Low Power Great Video Performance Availability Relatively Quiet	Not as fast as the 2600 XT Multiple Cards with Same Name