GeForce GTX 660 vs GeForce GTX 880M

Intro

The GeForce GTX 660 makes use of a 28 nm design. nVidia has clocked the core frequency at 980 MHz. The GDDR5 memory works at a frequency of 1502 MHz on this particular card. It features 960 SPUs along with 80 Texture Address Units and 24 Rasterization Operator Units.

Compare that to the GeForce GTX 880M, which has a GPU core clock speed of 954 MHz, and 4096 MB of GDDR5 RAM set to run at 1000 MHz through a 256-bit bus. It also features 1536 SPUs, 128 TAUs, and 32 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface within a second. It is calculated by multiplying the card's bus width by the speed of its memory. If the card has DDR RAM, the result should be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the bandwidth is, the faster 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 amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This figure is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels applied in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the clock speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the potential to reach the maximum fill rate.