The GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review, Feat. EVGA, Zotac, and Gigabyte
by Ryan Smith on August 16, 2012 9:00 AM ESTBatman: Arkham City
Batman: Arkham City is loosely based on Unreal Engine 3, while the DirectX 11 functionality was apparently developed in-house. With the addition of these features Batman is far more a GPU demanding game than its predecessor was, particularly with tessellation cranked up to high.
Both AMD and NVIDIA recently saw significant performance improvements here due to driver tweaks, which has shuffled the deck to a degree. With full memory bandwidth GK104 cards do well here, but this is not the case for the GTX 660 Ti. Next to Crysis this ends up being the second worst game for the GTX 660 Ti if you’re comparing it to the GTX 670, as the GTX 660 Ti trails by 19%. This also means that the GTX 660 Ti falls behind the 7950 by a couple percent.
The factory overclocked cards on the other hand offer more evidence that the GTX 660 Ti can recover with a bit more memory bandwidth, which is exactly what we’re seeing with the Zotac card and its 10% memory overclock. Altogether it’s a full 10% faster than the reference GTX 660 Ti, and 6% faster than the next-fastest factory overclocked card. If Zotac wants to justify their $30 premium then they’ll need more games like this, since it makes the card clearly stand apart from the others and makes it more than competitive with the 7950.
On a final note, we haven’t been paying too much attention to past-generation cards up to this point, but it’s worth taking a breather and reflecting upon the situation. So far the GTX 660 Ti is faster than the GTX 570, but it’s not amazingly so. Against the GTX 560 Ti it looks much better, but then it’s a matter of replacing a card that launched at $250 with one that launched at $300.
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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.