GeForce GTX 660 vs GeForce GTX 960

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 960, which has a GPU core clock speed of 1127 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR5 memory set to run at 1750 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is made up of 1024 SPUs, 64 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

GeForce GTX 960		7627 points
GeForce GTX 660		5063 points
	Difference: 2564 (51%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 960		120 Watts
GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
	Difference: 20 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce GTX 660 is 29% faster than the GeForce GTX 960 in general, due to its higher bandwidth. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 960		112000 MB/sec
	Difference: 32192 (29%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 will be just a bit (approximately 9%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 960. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 960		72128 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 6272 (9%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the GeForce GTX 960 is a better choice, and very much so. (explain)

GeForce GTX 960		36064 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 12544 (53%)

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 max amount of information (counted in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core 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 applied in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record 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 card's clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called 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 of the card - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.