GeForce GTX 590 vs GeForce GTX 660

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 660, which features a clock speed of 980 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1502 MHz. It also features a 192-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 960 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, 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

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 590 should in theory be quite a bit superior to the GeForce GTX 660 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 will be just a bit (about 1%) more effective at anisotropic filtering 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 screen resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 590 is the winner, by a large margin. (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: Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data (counted in MB per second) that can be moved past 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 RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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