The GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review, Feat. EVGA, Zotac, and Gigabyte
by Ryan Smith on August 16, 2012 9:00 AM ESTTotal War: Shogun 2
Total War: Shogun 2 is the latest installment of the long-running Total War series of turn based strategy games, and alongside Civilization V is notable for just how many units it can put on a screen at once. As it also turns out, it’s the single most punishing game in our benchmark suite (on higher end hardware at least).
Going into this benchmark we weren’t sure just how sensitive Shogun 2 would be to the GTX 660 Ti’s lack of memory bandwidth relative to the GTX 670; the answer as it turns out is “not very much”. At 1920 the GTX 660 Ti is 4% ahead of the 7950 and only 6% behind the GTX 670. Even at the much more demanding 2560 the GTX 660 Ti falls behind by a bit more, but 12% is still better than what we were seeing with Crysis a few minutes ago. Overall this has become a fairly NVIDIA-friendly benchmark, with the GTX 660 Ti challenging even the 7970 at 1920.
As for our factory overclocked cards, Gigabyte is once again in the lead and once again ahead of even the GTX 670. This is followed by the Zotac, and then with the weakest overclock the EVGA. The performance impact of these overclocks ranges from between 9% at the high end and 3% at the low end.
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Ryan Smith - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Long story short, we were having CMS problems earlier so we were messing with the URL slugs. Not that the slugs actually matter, but it's been fixed.Belard - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Slugs are important for soil health. slimy and kind of icky looking... they are good to have.Natfly - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Not to mention search engine optimizationBelard - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I see that.... oops.bhima - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
You show $399, but the MSRP is $319.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
A lot of em are going for $299, but why put anything in there but RELEASE PRICE on the chart - that way you can show the GTX570 at $349.Bias ? You decide.
BoloMKXXVIII - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
blanarahul, very insiteful comment.The GTX 660 Ti seems like a good "bang for your buck" card. NVidia should count itself lucky for having trouble keeping up with demand. My worry is they lose focus with the number of markets they are trying to fill. Something I am sure AMD will be watching for.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
Yes nVidia sure loses focus - uhh... loses focus...sales GREAT - loses focus...Biased stupidity ?
You decide.
What it means ?
No one knows.
Galidou - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
They're not loosing focus, it's a new strategy and it must work wonders. Instead of releasing new products as quickly as possible and fill the market with all the parts from low to high-end performance, they get out the new higher-end parts and rely on their last gen cards to fill the holes.Clean out the shelves so dealers don't get stuck with older technology not selling. And at the same time, not taxing new fabrication process(28nm in this case) by needing alot more to fill demand in every way.
Crazyeyeskillah - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
If they had released this at 249$ they would have never been able to supply the demand. . .why not just go for the jugular of amd? Oh yeah balance and perceived value in the market, only hurts us really.