Videocard - what number should I look at

[renochew]

Sorry for another graphic card thread.

I am planning to buy a new graphic card for home use, possibly only a mid-price range one, because of that I am not counting on the card can do a lot of the opencl stuff, I would rather look at its power consumption and noise level, etc.

But nonetheless, I still want to pick one with better performance for sure, so what number should I look at? The reason I ask is that, say for some old card like gtx580 and some later card like 660, for the same price range, you can get more memory with 660 (1.5 vs 2 GB), but all the other "technical" numbers looks inferior,

http://www.hwcompare.com/13161/geforce-gtx-580-vs-geforce-gtx-660-ti/

I am guessing the bandwidth/pixel rate things are relating to gaming, I am not a gamer at all, should I just simply pick the one with more memory?

Thank you.

[MohamedSakr]

for "OpenCL" performance, look at how many "CUDA/OpenCL" cores, memory capacity "1/1.5/2/3/6 GB" , memory speed "like 900MHZ(the higher the faster in calculation)"

generally speaking, for NVidia,get anything with x80 number "like 580,680,780" , Titan is better than 780 because of its memory capacity

[malexander]

If power consumption is a high priority, the newer 600 and 700 series are more efficient than the old 400 and 500 series. The 660 or 760 will offer good performance for the price, though choose one with at least 2GB of VRAM. The 670/770 and 680/780 quickly become expensive.

[renochew]

Thank you very much for the reply. I think I will get a 660 with 2GB memory. Just for sure, the Texel rate or Pixel rate as seen in those comparison graph is just for gaming purpose, am I correct?

Cheers

Reno

Edited July 30, 2013 by renochew

[MohamedSakr]

Texel rate is pretty important for programs like Mari , Mari doesn't accept cards lower than x60 , it is about "I guess" how fast,large the texturing can be done with the GPU "which is related to memory size on GPU too"