NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660

Compare NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 4 GB vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 3 GB, specs and GPU benchmark score. Which is the better graphics card for the money?

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Specifications
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GPU Comparison

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Benchmark Score

Overall Score

General gaming and workstation score

1419 points

73% significantly better overall score

816 points

Flux Core frame rate

Volumetric ray casting test, a computationally expensive method of rendering high-quality scenes

29 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher Flux Core frame rate

18 FPS

Electron frame rate

Randomly generated noise sphere test

22 FPS

11 FPS significantly higher Electron frame rate

11 FPS

City frame rate

Procedurally generated city scene with voxel rendering

20 FPS

7 FPS significantly higher City frame rate

13 FPS

Clouds frame rate

Real-time noise calculation and ray marching test

17 FPS

8 FPS significantly higher Clouds frame rate

9 FPS

Free GPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

3DMark Graphics score

High-end graphics benchmark

2293 points

74% significantly higher 3DMark Graphics score

1317 points

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

167.72 points

36% slightly higher Blender score

122.56 points

Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

CUDA compute benchmark

17784 points

107% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (CUDA) score

8583 points

Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

8773 points

61% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Metal) score

5449 points

Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

21072 points

85% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (OpenCL) score

11381 points

Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

22380 points

109% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (Vulkan) score

10693 points

Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

Metal compute benchmark

8773 points

103% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Metal) score

4311 points

Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

OpenCL compute benchmark

19796 points

74% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (OpenCL) score

11353 points

Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

Vulkan compute benchmark

20845 points

75% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (Vulkan) score

11858 points

Specifications

Core Clock Speed

Nominal chip frequency

1127 MHz

15% slightly higher core clock speed

980 MHz

Boost Clock Speed

Higher turbo frequency when power conditions are met

1178 MHz

14% slightly higher boost clock speed

1032 MHz

Memory

Onboard memory size for textures and vertices

4 GiB

33% slightly more memory

3 GiB

Memory Bus Width

Number of parallel lines to the memory chips

128 Bit

192 Bit

49% significantly larger memory bus width

Memory Bandwidth

Data transfer speed between GPU core and memory

112.2 GB/s

144.2 GB/s

28% slightly higher memory bandwidth

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the GPU

120 W

16% slightly lower TDP

140 W

Pixel Rate

Number of pixels that can be rendered per second

37.7 Gigapixels/s

82% significantly higher pixel rate

20.64 Gigapixels/s

Texture Rate

Number of textured pixels that can be rendered per second

75.39 Gigatexels/s

82.56 Gigatexels/s

9% slightly higher texture rate

Floating Point Performance

Raw number of floating point operations per second

2.41 TFLOPS

21% slightly better floating point performance

1.98 TFLOPS

Shading Units

Number of processors dedicated to shader processing

1024

6% slightly more shading units

960

Texture Mapping Units

Number of processors dedicated to applying textures

25% slightly more texture mapping units

Render Output Processors

Number of processors dedicated to final pixel rendering

33% slightly more render output processors

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

239th of 586

277th of 586

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2015 January

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

GDDR5

DirectX Support

Maximum version of DirectX supported

12.0

11.0

OpenGL Support

Maximum version of OpenGL supported

4.5

GeForce GTX 960 vs GeForce GTX 660 benchmarks

For gaming, the GeForce GTX 960 graphics card is better than the GeForce GTX 660 in our tests.

The GeForce GTX 960 has a slightly higher core clock speed. This is the frequency at which the graphics core is running at. While not necessarily an indicator of overall performance, this metric can be useful when comparing two GPUs based on the same architecture. In addition, the GeForce GTX 960 also has a slightly higher boost clock speed. The boost clock speed is the frequency that the GPU core can reach if the temperature is low enough. The allows for higher performance in certain scenarios.

Furthermore, the spec sheet for both these GPUs show that the GeForce GTX 960 has slightly more memory with 4 GiB of memory compared to 3 GiB. Lots of memory is good when playing at high resolutions or with many monitors.

In addition, the GeForce GTX 960 has a slightly lower TDP at 120 W when compared to the GeForce GTX 660 at 140 W. Heat output doesn't match power consumption directly but, it's a good estimate.

According to the results of the hardwareDB benchmark utility, the GeForce GTX 960 is faster than the GeForce GTX 660.