If you were wondering about system performance

[Kevin]

ATI's scheme is the following:

Which is pretty much what I said. Though I can see where I wasn't clear. The Tiers I refer to are from the link to Tom's site. Those tiers are based on the extensive benchmarking of the cards. I also used tier when talking about the ATI nomenclature. I can see where that could get confusing, but I was consistent within each paragraph.

The 4870 benchmarks a couple of "Tom tiers" above a 6670 (which performs around the same level as a 4830, and 5670) even though it is 2 ATI generations older. The "ATI Tier 6" cards (so 46xx, 56xx, 76xx) are generally pretty average for that ATI generation and often out performed by an older generation "ATI Tier 7" or "8" card (and of the course the 9 cards which as you mention are dual GPU on single board designs). I mostly mentioned that because while Mav's card is 3 years old it's still a fairly solid card that offers real world performance that is relatively close or better than some of the cards that are only one generation behind current.

So again my final paragraph stands. Based on the benchmarking data and the "Tom's Tiers" the HD 3650 is lumped one "Tom Tier" below the below the 6450 which was used in the original link for the D3 bench marking. It's also several "Tom Tiers" above the G210 that was also in the original link. So RedRadical can get a good idea of where his card would have performed in those benchmarks.

You of course can look at the big GPU charts if you want to really gauge if the "Tom tiers" are out of whack or to get more granularity, but as I mentioned the "Tom tiers" are pretty decently defined on that page.