GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon HD 5970

Intro

Compare that to the Radeon HD 5970, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM is set to run at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this particular model. It features 1600 SPUs as well as 160 Texture Address Units and 64 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
Radeon HD 5970		294 Watts
	Difference: 154 Watts (110%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon HD 5970 should theoretically perform a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 660 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		256000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 111808 (78%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 should be quite a bit (approximately 196%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTX 660. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		232000 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 153600 (196%)

Pixel Rate

The Radeon HD 5970 will be quite a bit (approximately 295%) more effective at FSAA than the GeForce GTX 660, and able to handle higher resolutions while still performing well. (explain)

Radeon HD 5970		92800 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 69280 (295%)

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: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (in units of megabytes per second) that can be transferred past the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the bus width by its memory speed. If it uses DDR type RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This is calculated by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core clock 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 in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip could possibly record to the local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the number of Render Output Units 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 fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the max fill rate.