GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 6970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has set the core speed at 880 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a frequency of 1375 MHz on this particular card. It features 1536 SPUs as well as 96 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 1593 (46%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6970 should theoretically be much superior to the GeForce GTX 660 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 31808 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 will be a little bit (more or less 8%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 660. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6080 (8%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6970 is superior to the GeForce GTX 660, though not by far. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4640 (20%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.