GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6790, which has a clock speed of 840 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1050 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It features 800 SPUs, 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

In theory, the GeForce GTX 660 should be 7% quicker than the Radeon HD 6790 overall, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 will be much (approximately 133%) better at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 6790. (explain)

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

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 is superior to the Radeon HD 6790, by far. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. It's calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant 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.