GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6790, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 800 SPUs as well as 40 Texture Address Units and 16 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 660		5063 points
Radeon HD 6790		2150 points
	Difference: 2913 (135%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
Radeon HD 6790		150 Watts
	Difference: 10 Watts (7%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 660 should theoretically be a bit better than the Radeon HD 6790 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6790		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 9792 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 is much (more or less 133%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		33600 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44800 (133%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 is much (more or less 75%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 6790, and will be able to handle higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 6790		13440 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10080 (75%)

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 maximum amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 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 higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in one second.

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