GeForce GTX 660 vs Radeon R9 285

Intro

Compare those specs to the Radeon R9 285, which comes with a core clock frequency of 918 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 1375 MHz. It also makes use of a 256-bit bus, and uses a 28 nm design. It is comprised of 1792 SPUs, 112 Texture Address Units, and 32 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

Radeon R9 285		8500 points
GeForce GTX 660		5063 points
	Difference: 3437 (68%)

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTX 660		140 Watts
Radeon R9 285		190 Watts
	Difference: 50 Watts (36%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon R9 285 should theoretically perform much faster than the GeForce GTX 660 in general. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		176000 MB/sec
GeForce GTX 660		144192 MB/sec
	Difference: 31808 (22%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon R9 285 is much (more or less 31%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce GTX 660. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		102816 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		78400 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 24416 (31%)

Pixel Rate

If running with high levels of AA is important to you, then the Radeon R9 285 is the winner, by far. (explain)

Radeon R9 285		29376 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTX 660		23520 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 5856 (25%)

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: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface within a second. It's calculated by multiplying the card's interface width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR RAM, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied in one second. This number is worked out by multiplying the total number of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the most pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory in one second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the number of colour ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - aka 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 get to the max fill rate.