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GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

The GeForce GTX 660 has a core clock speed of 980 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1502 MHz. It also makes use of a 192-bit bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It features 960 SPUs, 80 Texture Address Units, and 24 ROPs.

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 5850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM works at a speed of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs along with 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 should be 13% quicker than the Radeon HD 5850 in general, 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 should be a lot (more or less 50%) faster with regards to AF 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 a little bit (approximately 1%) better at FSAA than the Radeon HD 5850, and will be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (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

Amazon.com

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Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

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Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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 max amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in a second. It's worked out by multiplying the interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the 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 can be applied per second. This is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics 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 maximum number of pixels the video card could possibly record to the local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.

Display Prices

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GeForce GTX 660

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Radeon HD 5850

Amazon.com

Check prices at:

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords - sometimes it might show cards with very similar names that are not exactly the same as the one chosen in the comparison. We do try to filter out the wrong results as best we can, though.

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