GeForce GTX 560 vs GeForce GTX 660

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 660, which comes with core clock speeds of 980 MHz on the GPU, and 1502 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 960 SPUs as well as 80 TAUs and 24 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 660		5063 points
GeForce GTX 560		3030 points
	Difference: 2033 (67%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
GeForce GTX 560		150 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (7%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 660 will be 13% quicker than the GeForce GTX 560 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 560		128128 MB/sec
	Difference: 16064 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 should be a lot (more or less 73%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 560. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 560		45360 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 33040 (73%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 560 is a little bit (about 10%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 660, and should be capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 560		25920 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2400 (10%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.