GeForce 9800 GTX vs GeForce GTX 660

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 660, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 980 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a speed of 1502 MHz on this particular card. It features 960 SPUs as well as 80 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Both cards have the same power consumption.

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 660 will be 105% faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		70400 MB/sec
	Difference: 73792 (105%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 should be much (approximately 81%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GTX. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		43200 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 35200 (81%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 is a better choice, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GTX		10800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12720 (118%)

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 maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core clock speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, 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 amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Raster Operations Pipelines by the the core clock speed. 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 rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.