GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB vs GeForce GTX 660

Intro

Compare all of that to the GeForce GTX 660, which has GPU clock speed of 980 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1502 MHz through a 192-bit bus. It also is made up of 960 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Address Units, and 24 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		84 Watts
GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
	Difference: 56 Watts (67%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 660 should in theory be much faster than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		38400 MB/sec
	Difference: 105792 (276%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 is quite a bit (approximately 197%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		26400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 52000 (197%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 is superior to the GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB, by a large margin. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9600 GSO 768MB		6600 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 16920 (256%)

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 information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.