Biostar GeForce GT 1030 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 1.5 GB (OEM)

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 1.5 GB (OEM) card has substantially better pixel fill rate due to greater number of ROPs, even though its graphics frequency is lower. Having higher pixel fillrate allows the graphics card to draw more pixels on screen and off screen, which is beneficial for some 3D effects in games, or when playing at higher display resolutions.

Even so it has lower graphics frequency, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 1.5 GB (OEM) comes with 4 times as many TMUs (Texture Mapping Units), resulting in much better texture fill rate. Better texture fill rate means that the GPU can map more textures and/or use more sophisticated 3D effects for each texel, which improves games visual appearance.

Single Precision performance indicates how many single-precision floating point operations the card can execute per second. The performance is measured in billions of Floating Point Operations Per Second, or GFLOPS. Since FP calculations are performed by shaders, CUDA cores or stream processors, the performance is directly proportional to their number. Processor clock also influences it. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 1.5 GB (OEM) graphics card is significantly faster here. Higher single-precision performance number means the graphics card will perform better in general computing applications. Since stream processors or CUDA cores are also used as vertex and geometry shaders for 3D image generation, higher performance is also beneficial to games.

To speed up processing, the graphics cards store 3D scene data, textures and intermediate data, used for image generation, in on-board memory. The video memory usually has much higher bandwidth than system RAM, and more bandwidth allows the GPU to run at higher screen resolutions, use larger and more detailed textures, and apply more complex 3D effects and filters. Memory type, speed, and memory interface width all affect the bandwidth value. Specifically, higher memory bandwidth of the GeForce GTX 660 1.5 GB (OEM) card is due to wider memory bus.