GeForce GTX 650 vs GeForce GTX 660

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 660, which uses a 28 nm design. nVidia has set the core frequency at 980 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1502 MHz on this particular card. It features 960 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 24 ROPs.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Benchmarks

These are real-world performance benchmarks that were submitted by Hardware Compare users. The scores seen here are the average of all benchmarks submitted for each respective test and hardware.

3DMark Fire Strike Graphics Score

GeForce GTX 660		5063 points
GeForce GTX 650		2263 points
	Difference: 2800 (124%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 650		64 Watts
GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
	Difference: 76 Watts (119%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the GeForce GTX 660 should be 80% quicker than the GeForce GTX 650 overall, due to its greater bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 650		80000 MB/sec
	Difference: 64192 (80%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 will be quite a bit (more or less 132%) faster with regards to AF than the GeForce GTX 650. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 650		33856 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 44544 (132%)

Pixel Rate

If using a high resolution is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 660 is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 650		16928 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 6592 (39%)

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 (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, 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 can be applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka Render Output Units) are responsible for filling the screen with pixels (the image). The actual pixel rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the maximum fill rate.