For those that don't remember, the Radeon HD 3690 (55nm RV670 Pro) is here to substitute the recently introduced HD 3850. According to it's nomenclature, it should find a place between the 3650 and the 3850.

Selling for little more than $100, this card was supposed to perform closer to the 3650 than to the 3850. Specifications are nearly identical to those of the higher rated chip, but with a memory bus that's been reduced to the half (from 256 to 128 bits), there was little hope that it would be much better than the 3650. Hope, they say, is the last thing you should lose.

In this article from the guys at PCPOP we see the new GPU pitted against the 3850 and a couple of nVidia cards in the same price range. The verdict is completely different if you look at 3DMark or pay attention to real games. Synthetic tests say the 3690 is clearly inferior to the 3850, but the only game that sees a similar behavior is Call Of Duty 4. Crysis, Lost Planet, Company Of Heroes, World In Conflict, BioShock, Age Of Empires 3, HL2: Episode Two, UT3, NFS: ProStreet and Quake Wars favour the 3850 too (all of them), and they do it by a healthy margin in some cases, but not as much as to have a great impact on playability.

Considering the price difference, it could be a good buy.

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