GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon R9 270X

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 270X, which comes with core clock speeds of 1000 MHz on the GPU, and 1400 MHz on the 2048 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 1280 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 32 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

Radeon R9 270X		6590 points
GeForce GTX 660		5063 points
	Difference: 1527 (30%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
Radeon R9 270X		180 Watts
	Difference: 40 Watts (29%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 270X, in theory, should perform quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 660 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		179200 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 35008 (24%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 270X will be just a bit (approximately 2%) better at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 660. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		80000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (2%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high screen resolution is important to you, then the Radeon R9 270X is the winner, and very much so. (explain)

Radeon R9 270X		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 8480 (36%)

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 largest amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface in a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its 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 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 also depends on quite a few other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the max fill rate.