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GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

The GeForce GTX 660 comes with a clock frequency of 980 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1502 MHz. It also uses a 192-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 960 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 24 ROPs.

Compare those specifications to the Radeon HD 5850, which comes with core clock speeds of 725 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 TAUs and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 11 Watts (8%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 660 is 13% quicker than the Radeon HD 5850 overall, because of its greater data rate. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16192 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 will be a lot (approximately 50%) more effective at texture filtering than the Radeon HD 5850. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 26200 (50%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 will be just a bit (about 1%) more effective at full screen anti-aliasing than the Radeon HD 5850, and able to handle higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 320 (1%)

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

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GeForce GTX 660

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Radeon HD 5850

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Specifications

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Model	GeForce GTX 660	Radeon HD 5850
Manufacturer	nVidia	AMD
Year	September 2012	September 30, 2009
Code Name	GK106	Cypress PRO
Memory	2048 MB	1024 MB
Core Speed	980 MHz	725 MHz
Memory Speed	6008 MHz	4000 MHz
Power (Max TDP)	140 watts	151 watts
Bandwidth	144192 MB/sec	128000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	78400 Mtexels/sec	52200 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	23520 Mpixels/sec	23200 Mpixels/sec
Unified Shaders	960	1440(288x5)
Texture Mapping Units	80	72
Render Output Units	24	32
Bus Type	GDDR5	GDDR5
Bus Width	192-bit	256-bit
Fab Process	28 nm	40 nm
Transistors	2540 million	2154 million
Bus	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 2.1 x16
DirectX Version	DirectX 11.0	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 4.3	OpenGL 3.2

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the largest amount of data (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core 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 in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate also depends on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.

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