GeForce 9800 GX2 vs GeForce GTX 660

Intro

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 660, which features a clock frequency of 980 MHz and a GDDR5 memory speed of 1502 MHz. It also uses a 192-bit memory bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It features 960 SPUs, 80 TAUs, and 24 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
GeForce 9800 GX2		197 Watts
	Difference: 57 Watts (41%)

Memory Bandwidth

Performance-wise, the GeForce GTX 660 should in theory be just a bit superior to the GeForce 9800 GX2 in general. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		128000 MB/sec
	Difference: 16192 (13%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 is just a bit (approximately 2%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 9800 GX2. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		76800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 1600 (2%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce GTX 660 will be a lot (approximately 23%) faster with regards to AA than the GeForce 9800 GX2, and also should be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
GeForce 9800 GX2		19200 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 4320 (23%)

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 largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be moved past the external memory interface in one second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, High Dynamic Range and high resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the graphics card could possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.