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GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 7970

Intro

The GeForce GTX 660 comes with a GPU core speed of 980 MHz, and the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM is set to run at 1502 MHz through a 192-bit bus. It also features 960 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 24 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 7970, which comes with a clock frequency of 925 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1375 MHz. It also features a 384-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 2048 SPUs, 128 Texture Address Units, and 32 ROPs.

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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

The Radeon HD 7970, in theory, should perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 660 in general. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 will be a lot (approximately 51%) better at AF than the GeForce GTX 660. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 7970 should be much (about 26%) faster with regards to full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 660, and will be capable of handling higher screen resolutions without losing too much performance. (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

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GeForce GTX 660

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

Specifications

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Model GeForce GTX 660 Radeon HD 7970
Manufacturer nVidia AMD
Year September 2012 January 2012
Code Name GK106 Tahiti XT
Memory 2048 MB 3072 MB
Core Speed 980 MHz 925 MHz
Memory Speed 6008 MHz 5500 MHz
Power (Max TDP) 140 watts 250 watts
Bandwidth 144192 MB/sec 264000 MB/sec
Texel Rate 78400 Mtexels/sec 118400 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate 23520 Mpixels/sec 29600 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders 960 2048
Texture Mapping Units 80 128
Render Output Units 24 32
Bus Type GDDR5 GDDR5
Bus Width 192-bit 384-bit
Fab Process 28 nm 28 nm
Transistors 2540 million 4313 million
Bus PCIe 3.0 x16 PCIe 3.0 x16
DirectX Version DirectX 11.0 DirectX 11.1
OpenGL Version OpenGL 4.3 OpenGL 4.2

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high 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 clock 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 applied per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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GeForce GTX 660

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 7970

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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