GeForce GTX 550 Ti vs GeForce GTX 660

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 660, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core speed at 980 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1502 MHz on this specific card. It features 960 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

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
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		1897 points
	Difference: 3166 (167%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 550 Ti		116 Watts
GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
	Difference: 24 Watts (21%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 660 should in theory perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		98496 MB/sec
	Difference: 45696 (46%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 is quite a bit (approximately 172%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 550 Ti. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		28800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 49600 (172%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 is a better choice, but it probably won't make a huge difference. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 550 Ti		21600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 1920 (9%)

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 maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the video 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 most pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number 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 filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.