Compare any two graphics cards:

GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 7850

Intro

The GeForce GTX 660 uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 980 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1502 MHz on this card. It features 960 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 24 ROPs.

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7850, which features GPU core speed of 860 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM running at 1200 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1024 SPUs, 64 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

(No game benchmarks for this combination yet.)

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

Performance-wise, the Radeon HD 7850 should theoretically be a small bit superior to the GeForce GTX 660 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 should be a lot (approximately 42%) more effective at texture 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 a small bit (approximately 17%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 660, and will be able to handle higher 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

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce GTX 660

Amazon.com

Other US-based stores

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.de

Amazon.fr

Radeon HD 7850

Amazon.com

Other US-based stores

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.de

Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce GTX 660	Radeon HD 7850
Manufacturer	nVidia	ATi
Year	September 2012	March 2012
Code Name	GK106	Pitcairn Pro
Fab Process	28 nm	28 nm
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Memory	2048 MB	2048 MB
Core Speed	980 MHz	860 MHz
Shader Speed	980 MHz	(N/A) MHz
Memory Speed	1502 MHz (6008 MHz effective)	1200 MHz (4800 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	960	1024
Texture Mapping Units	80	64
Render Output Units	24	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	192-bit	256-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.1	DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.3	OpenGL 4.2
Power (Max TDP)	140 watts	130 watts
Shader Model	5.0	5.0
Bandwidth	144192 MB/sec	153600 MB/sec
Texel Rate	78400 Mtexels/sec	55040 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	23520 Mpixels/sec	27520 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.