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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
313 Comments
View All Comments
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, August 25, 2012 - link
nVidia= "drivers fixed immediately"amd= " drivers not fixed for years, and broken fixing something else"
JM Popaleetus - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Ryan,Can we expect some benchmarks and data in regards to the 660 and further overclocking?
Ryan Smith - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Going up now.bill4 - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
When I just checked newegg and there are no 660 TI in stock?Or for that matter, that 680 was impossible to find for *months*? Why is that OK? I saw NO reviewers ever nick Nvidia for that one...
Ryan Smith - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Hi bill;That's a reasonable question.
First and foremost, it's 7am in the morning. Newegg doesn't always post stock updates this early, so GTX 660 Ti cards may not show up until a bit later in the day. Though EVGA already has their cards up on their site.
As for our concerns about launch availability, it's the difference between what is being claimed and what is being delivered. NVIDIA told us right from the start that the supply of the GTX 680 would be tight, and that's exactly what happened. AMD told us that the 7970GE would be available in late June, and that did not happen.
Mind you, AMD isn't having supply issues either. The 7970GE wasn't late because AMD was having any kind of trouble supplying partners with suitable GPUs.
antef - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I got badly bitten this generation by the classic "new products are just around the corner" conundrum. I wanted to upgrade exactly this time last year but didn't because I wanted the new and more efficient 28nm AMD cards that were supposedly just around the corner. Instead, they came late and were a huge letdown: too expensive and not the kind of performance boost I was expecting. Then NVIDIA countered but only focused on the high-end for all these months. However it did seem that NVIDIA had the better, more efficient product. So I was waiting for their card in the $200-300 range and finally after a whole year it's here.The price is a bit high, but I'm tired of waiting and will probably jump on this. I like the cool and silent operation of the Gigabyte but Ryan speaks highly of the ZOTAC as well, not sure which to get.
Should I jump on this as soon as I see retail availability?
just4U - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I have to disagree.. they were not a letdown at all.. Price seemed to be the only major complaint people were having. But in a way AMD has been on the ball. Their a step ahead of Nvidia in getting next gen products out and a half step behind in performance. To me that seems pretty good.rarson - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
Yeah, and price was only an issue because people were ignoring economic and manufacturing factors and making unreasonable expectations.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
Yeah sure there rarson, it wasn't AMD in a fit of corporate piggery and immense greed scalping the crap out of us and abandoning the gaming community for as long as they could possibly keep selling their junk at a huge inflated price.....Oh wait.... it was.
Galidou - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
And would you stop exaggerating with your conspirations and overpriced SHIT language all over the place. What hurts the most in the past if we speak about pricing stupidity is probably buying an i7-980x cpu for 1100$ and then one week later sandy bridge gets out and tramples the cpu at 220-300$ price points with an i5-2500k and i7-2600k... speak about inflated prices for pieces of hardware that must cost not even 30$ to manufacture.Nvidia as any other company isn't being nicer, it's still based on maximum profit. They probably sell video cards that costs 20$ to manufacture and beleive me the profit doesn't go into funding environmental projects to get rid of all the electric wastes we create every year.
They pay developpers like any other company to get games optimized for their hardware and what's happening now, reduces our choices depending on the games we play. They still ask reviewers to ensure their products have the best performance in their reviews. That's, to me, liying to the consumer(US) so they sell more stuff. Even if their product is good(which they are), that's still manipulating the opinion, thus they do not work for the people, they work for the profit.
So... please, stop speaking about Nvidia like if everything they do has been decided by god before and thus is perfect in every way... it doesn't work. You won't be a better human nor be more happy if you play more game thanks to the performance of your video card, you'll just end up being more addicted and that's it.