GeForce GTX 570 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 frequency at 980 MHz. The GDDR5 RAM runs at a speed of 1502 MHz on this card. It features 960 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units 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 660		5063 points
GeForce GTX 570		4387 points
	Difference: 676 (15%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
GeForce GTX 570		219 Watts
	Difference: 79 Watts (56%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 570 should in theory be just a bit better than the GeForce GTX 660 overall. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		152000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 7808 (5%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 should be much (approximately 79%) better at anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 570. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 570		43920 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 34480 (79%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 570 should be a lot (approximately 24%) better at AA than the GeForce GTX 660, and will be able to handle higher resolutions more effectively. (explain)

GeForce GTX 570		29280 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5760 (24%)

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 (in units of MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied per second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total texture units of the card by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the video 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 number of pixels that the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the number of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output 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.