GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 6790

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6790, which makes use of a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core frequency at 840 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a speed of 1050 MHz on this specific card. It features 800 SPUs along with 40 Texture Address Units and 16 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

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 will be 7% quicker than the Radeon HD 6790 overall, due to its higher data rate. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 should be quite a bit (about 133%) faster with regards to 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

The GeForce GTX 660 is much (about 75%) faster with regards to FSAA than the Radeon HD 6790, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (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. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the number of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.