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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CeriseCogburn - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
If they can't supply it - it cannot lower competitor prices, and can't be bought, so they make little or no money, and everyone else buys the available competitors product.Why doesn't AMD release a card that drives down the 680's price $170 per card and makes nVidia give away 3 free games with it too ?
That would make too much sense for amd and we consumers and some competition that crushes evil corporate profiteering nVidia, so AMD should do it.
(roll eyes)
To answer your question> nVidia is being nice not draining all the red blood from amd's jugular since amd is bleeding out so badly already that if nVidia took them out a million raging in 3d fanboys would scream for billions in payola in a giant lawsuit they protest for in front of the UN and the IMF and the International Court and the 25k persons traveling EURO unelected power bureaucrats.
So instead of all that terribleness and making amd fans cry, nVidia is nice about it.
Galidou - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
This card at 249$ would be very bad for AMD but not very good for Nvidia either. Considering how close it already is to it's bigger brother, it would probably cut a good percentage of gtx 670 sales.So yeah, 249$ might seem a good price for US but they don't want to harm themselves either.
Belard - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
What does TI mean?Where is the GTX 660? So its really a 670 with a hand chopped off?
ericloewe - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
TI means something along the lines of "We'll release a crap version later on that only OEMs will buy, called the GTX 660."Patflute - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
lolwutOmega215D - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I think it still means "Titanium" version of a chip which was supposedly better than the non-Ti.MrSpadge - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
It means "We can't figure out how to distinguish our products using 3 decimal numbers and up to 3 letters in front of it (or the lack thereof), so we'll add some more letters".R3MF - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
in the anand review of the 450 where Nvidia first showed the lopsided memory bus arrangement it was noted that CUDA apps would not recognise the full memory complement.has this now been fixed?
Ryan Smith - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Yes. That was fixed almost immediately.R3MF - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
thanks Ryan