GeForce GTX 590 vs GeForce GTX 660

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 660, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 980 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1502 MHz on this particular card. 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 590		6680 points
GeForce GTX 660		5063 points
	Difference: 1617 (32%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (161%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 590 is 128% faster than the GeForce GTX 660 in general, because of its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 184128 (128%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 is a small bit (approximately 1%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 704 (1%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 590 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 34752 (148%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.