GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 6870

Intro

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 6870, which has clock speeds of 900 MHz on the GPU, and 1050 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1120 SPUs along with 56 Texture Address Units and 32 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
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

As far as performance goes, the GeForce GTX 660 should in theory be a bit better than the Radeon HD 6870 overall. (explain)

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

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 is quite a bit (about 56%) faster with regards to anisotropic 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 using high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon HD 6870 is the winner, by far. (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: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 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, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.