GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 7850, which comes with a clock frequency of 860 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 1024 SPUs, 64 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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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

Radeon HD 7850		5200 points
GeForce GTX 660		5063 points
	Difference: 137 (3%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 7850		130 Watts
GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the Radeon HD 7850 will be 7% quicker than the GeForce GTX 660 in general, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 9408 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 should be much (about 42%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7850		55040 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 23360 (42%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7850 is just a bit (more or less 17%) better at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 660, and also should be capable of handling higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 7850		27520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4000 (17%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen 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 better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

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