GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs Radeon HD 7870

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 7870, which has a core clock speed of 1000 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1200 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1280 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

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 HD 7870		6230 points
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		6013 points
	Difference: 217 (4%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		150 Watts
Radeon HD 7870		175 Watts
	Difference: 25 Watts (17%)

Memory Bandwidth

In theory, the Radeon HD 7870 should be 7% faster than the GeForce GTX 660 Ti in general, due to its greater data rate. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		153600 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		144000 MB/sec
	Difference: 9600 (7%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti is much (about 28%) more effective at anisotropic filtering than the Radeon HD 7870. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660 Ti		102480 Mtexels/sec
Radeon HD 7870		80000 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 22480 (28%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon HD 7870 is the winner, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 7870		32000 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660 Ti		21960 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10040 (46%)

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 data (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transported past the external memory interface in one second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.