GeForce GTX 480 vs GeForce GTX 660

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 660, which features a clock frequency of 980 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1502 MHz. It also features a 192-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is made up of 960 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 24 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
GeForce GTX 480		3650 points
	Difference: 1413 (39%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
GeForce GTX 480		250 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 480, in theory, should be much faster than the GeForce GTX 660 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		177408 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 33216 (23%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 is a lot (more or less 87%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 480. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 480		42000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 36400 (87%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 480 will be much (more or less 43%) better at full screen anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 660, and also will be able to handle higher screen resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 480		33600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10080 (43%)

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 information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, 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 number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total texture units 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 processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated 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 also depends on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.