GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 6970

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 6970, which features a GPU core clock speed of 880 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1375 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also is comprised of 1536 SPUs, 96 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation 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
Radeon HD 6970		3470 points
	Difference: 1593 (46%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
Radeon HD 6970		250 Watts
	Difference: 110 Watts (79%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 6970 should in theory perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 660 overall. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 31808 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be a small bit (more or less 8%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 660. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		84480 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6080 (8%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6970 should be just a bit (about 20%) more effective at anti-aliasing than the GeForce GTX 660, and also should be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6970		28160 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4640 (20%)

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 transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels that the graphics chip could possibly write to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.