GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs GeForce GTX 870M

Intro

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core speed at 915 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is set to run at a frequency of 1500 MHz on this specific card. It features 1344 SPUs as well as 112 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare those specs to the GeForce GTX 870M, which has clock speeds of 941 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 3072 MB of GDDR5 memory. It features 1344 SPUs along with 112 TAUs and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (in units of MB per second) that can be transferred across the external memory interface within a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that can be applied in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units 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 per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly write to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of colour ROPs by the the card's 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 is also dependant on quite a few other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth of the card - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.