GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 6950

Intro

Compare all of that to the Radeon HD 6950, which has clock speeds of 800 MHz on the GPU, and 1250 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1408 SPUs as well as 88 TAUs and 32 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 6950		3240 points
	Difference: 1823 (56%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
Radeon HD 6950		200 Watts
	Difference: 60 Watts (43%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 6950 should in theory be a small bit superior to the GeForce GTX 660 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		160000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 15808 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 will be a little bit (about 11%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6950. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6950		70400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 8000 (11%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 6950 should be a small bit (more or less 9%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 660, and also will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

Radeon HD 6950		25600 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2080 (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: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high 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 by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher this number, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied per second.

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