GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 6870, which comes with a core clock speed of 900 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1050 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 40 nm design. It is made up of 1120 SPUs, 56 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 6870		2870 points
	Difference: 2193 (76%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
Radeon HD 6870		151 Watts
	Difference: 11 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 660 should in theory perform a small bit faster than the Radeon HD 6870 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
Radeon HD 6870		134400 MB/sec
	Difference: 9792 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 is a lot (approximately 56%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 6870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 6870		50400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 28000 (56%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 6870		28800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5280 (22%)

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 largest amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. In the case of DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better 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 are 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 higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. 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.