GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 3690/3830

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon HD 3690/3830, which has a core clock frequency of 668 MHz and a GDDR3 memory speed of 828 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and uses a 55 nm design. It is made up of 320(64x5) SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 16 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon HD 3690/3830		75 Watts
GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
	Difference: 65 Watts (87%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 660 should in theory be a lot superior to the Radeon HD 3690/3830 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		26496 MB/sec
	Difference: 117696 (444%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 will be much (approximately 634%) faster with regards to texture filtering than the Radeon HD 3690/3830. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 67712 (634%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
Radeon HD 3690/3830		10688 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12832 (120%)

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 (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

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

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