GeForce GTX 590 vs GeForce GTX 660

Intro

Compare those specifications to the GeForce GTX 660, which makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 980 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1502 MHz on this particular card. It features 960 SPUs along with 80 TAUs 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 590		6680 points
GeForce GTX 660		5063 points
	Difference: 1617 (32%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
GeForce GTX 590		365 Watts
	Difference: 225 Watts (161%)

Memory Bandwidth

The GeForce GTX 590 should in theory perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 660 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		328320 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 184128 (128%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 will be a little bit (more or less 1%) more effective at AF than the GeForce GTX 590. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 590		77696 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 704 (1%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 590 should be much (approximately 148%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 660, and will be able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

GeForce GTX 590		58272 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 34752 (148%)

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.

One or more cards in this comparison are multi-core. This means that their bandwidth, texel and pixel rates are theoretically doubled - this does not mean the card will actually perform twice as fast, but only that it should in theory be able to. Actual game benchmarks will give a more accurate idea of what it's capable of.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It is worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR memory, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum 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 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 the video card could possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel output rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.