GeForce GTX 660 vs GeForce GTX 980

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 980, which comes with clock speeds of 1126 MHz on the GPU, and 1750 MHz on the 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 2048 SPUs along with 128 Texture Address Units and 64 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 980		13552 points
GeForce GTX 660		5063 points
	Difference: 8489 (168%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
GeForce GTX 980		165 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (18%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically, the GeForce GTX 980 should be quite a bit faster than the GeForce GTX 660 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		224000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 79808 (55%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 is much (approximately 84%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 660. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		144128 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 65728 (84%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 980 will be much (more or less 206%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 660, and also capable of handling higher resolutions without losing too much performance. (explain)

GeForce GTX 980		72064 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 48544 (206%)

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 MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. It's worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. If the card has 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 AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units by the the card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the max fill rate.