Portal 2

Portal 2 continues the long and proud tradition of Valve’s in-house Source engine. While Source continues to be a DX9 engine, Valve has continued to upgrade it over the years to improve its quality, and combined with their choice of style you’d have a hard time telling it’s over 7 years old at this point. Consequently Portal 2’s performance does get rather high on high-end cards, but we have ways of fixing that…

The GTX 660 Ti is still fast enough for us to use SSAA, so that’s where we’ll focus today. At 1920 it can deliver 94fps with 4x SSAA, and even at 2560 it’s just shy of 60fps. Whatever NVIDIA changed with Kepler to improve its SSAA performance made it a monster here, which is made all the more impressive by the fact that we’re dealing with a memory bandwidth and ROP reduced version. It would appear the biggest bottleneck for SSAA performance here is the shaders, which makes this a near-ideal scenario for the GTX 660 Ti.

Overall the entire Radeon 7900 series falls to the GTX 660 Ti by a greater than 20% margin here, and even the GTX 570 is more than humbled. If NVIDIA could do this on more games then they’d be in an excellent position.

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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

    lolwut
  • Omega215D - 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

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