GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 7970, which makes use of a 28 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 925 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a speed of 1375 MHz on this card. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 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 7970		8225 points
GeForce GTX 660		5063 points
	Difference: 3162 (62%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
Radeon HD 7970		250 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the Radeon HD 7970 should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 660 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		264000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 119808 (83%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be much (more or less 51%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 660. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		118400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 40000 (51%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7970 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7970		29600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6080 (26%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of ROPs 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 output rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.