The GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review, Feat. EVGA, Zotac, and Gigabyte
by Ryan Smith on August 16, 2012 9:00 AM ESTThe First TXAA Game & The Test
With the release of the NVIDIA’s 304.xx drivers a couple of months ago, NVIDIA finally enabled driver support on Kepler for their new temporal anti-aliasing technology. First announced with the launch of Kepler, TXAA is another anti-aliasing technology to be developed by Timothy Lottes, an engineer in NVIDIA’s developer technology group. In a nutshell, TXAA is a wide tent (>1px) MSAA filter combined with a temporal filter (effectively a motion-vector based frame blend) that is intended to resolve that pesky temporal aliasing that can be seen in motion in many games.
Because TXAA requires MSAA support and motion vector tracking by the game itself, it can only be used in games that specifically implement it. Consequently, while NVIDIA had enabled driver support for it, they’ve been waiting on a game to be released that implements it. That release finally happened last week with a patch for the MMO The Secret World, which became the first game with TXAA support.
This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive review of TXAA (MMOs and deterministic testing are like oil and water), but seeing as how this is the first time TXAA has been enabled we did want to comment on it.
On the whole, what NVIDIA is trying to accomplish here is to implement movie-like anti-aliasing at a reasonable performance cost. Traditionally SSAA would be the solution here (just like it is to most other image aliasing problems), but of course SSAA is much too expensive most of the time. At its lower setting it is just 2x MSAA plus the temporal component, which makes the process rather cheap.
Unfortunately by gaming standards it’s also really blurry. This is due to the combination of the wide tent MSAA samples – which if you remember your history, ATI tried at one time – and the temporal filter blending data from multiple frames. TXAA does a completely fantastic job of eliminating temporal and other forms of aliasing, but it does so at a notable cost to image clarity.
Editorially speaking we’ll never disparage NVIDIA for trying new AA methods – it never hurts to try something new – however at the same time we do reserve the right to be picky. We completely understand the direction NVIDIA went with this and why they did it, especially since there’s a general push to make games more movie-like in the first place, but we’re not big fans of the outcome. You would be hard pressed to find someone that hates jaggies more than I (which is why we have SSAA in one of our tests), but as an interactive medium I have come to expect sharpness, sharpness that would make my eyes bleed. Especially when it comes to multiplayer games, where being able to see the slightest movement in the distance can be a distinct advantage.
To that end, TXAA is unquestionably an interesting technology and worth keeping an eye on in the future, but practically speaking AMD’s efforts to implement complex lighting cheaply on a forward renderer (and thereby making MSAA cheap and effective) are probably more relevant to improving the state of AA. But this is by no means the final word, and we’ll certainly revisit TXAA in detail in the future once it’s enabled on a game that offers a more deterministic way of testing image quality.
The Test
NVIDIA’s GTX 660 Ti launch drivers are 305.37, which are a further continuation of the 304.xx branch. Compared to the previous two 304.xx drivers there are no notable performance changes or bug fixes that we’re aware of.
Meanwhile on the AMD side we’re continuing to use the Catalyst 12.7 betas released back in late June. AMD just released Catalyst 12.8 yesterday, which appear to be a finalized version of the 12.7 driver.
On a final note, for the time being we have dropped Starcraft II from our tests. The recent 1.5 patch has had a notable negative impact on our performance (and disabled our ability to play replays without logging in every time), so we need to further investigate the issue and likely rebuild our entire collection of SC2 benchmarks.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.2.3.1022 |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Monitor: |
Samsung 305T Asus PA246Q |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 7870 AMD Radeon HD 7950 AMD Radeon HD 7950B AMD Radeon HD 7970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 Zotac GeForce GTX 660 Ti AMP! Edition EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Superclocked Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 Ti OC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 304.79 Beta NVIDIA ForceWare 305.37 AMD Catalyst 12.7 Beta |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
I really didn't read your rant just skimmed your crybaby whine.So who cares you had an emotional blowout. Take some midol.
Galidou - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
Attacking and attacking again, you have so much respect it's almost admirable. Respect is the most important thing in the world, if you can't have some for even people you don't know, I'm sorry but you're missing on something here.Galidou - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
I love it when people state their disrespectful opinion as a fact. Really drives their point home, yep.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
Take a look at your 7950 SKYRIM LOSS in triple monitor to the 660Ti and the 660Ti also beats the 7950 boost and the 7970 !5760x1080 4x aa 16x af
ROFLMAO !
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/08/16/nvidia...
YES, YOU DID YOUR "RESEARCH"... now you've lost every stupid argument you started. Stupid.
Galidou - Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - link
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GT...http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canu...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-66...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6159/the-geforce-gtx...
Every review shows the 660ti under EVEN the 7870 and your review shows the 660 ti performing to the level of a 7970, flawed bullscrap. Your website has a problem, the same you have, it has a choosen side aka Fanboyism.
I have both right now my wife uses the 660 ti in her pc for Guild wars 2 at 1080p and I bought the 7950 and overclocked both in my pc to test and the 7950 hands down tramples over the gtx 660 ti even both fully overclocked. I tested with skyrim on 3 monitor 5760*1080 and that's the only game I play.
Now don't get MAD, I never said the gtx 660 ti is a bad card, it works wonders. But it gets trampled at 5760*1080 in skyrim end of the line...
TheJian - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
Actually I think they need to raise the clocks, and charge more, accepting the fact they will run hotter and use more watts. At least they can get more for the product, rather than having people saying you can OC them to 1100. Clock the normals at 900/1000 and the 7970@1050/1100 or so. Then charge more. Of course Nv is putting pricing pressure on them at the same time, but this move would allow them to be worth more out of the box so it wouldn't be as unreasonable. AT out of the box right now you can't charge more because they perform so poorly against what is being sold (and benchmarked) in the stores.With NV/Intel chewing them from both ends AMD isn't making money. But I think that's their fault with the mhz/pricing they're doing to themselves. They haven't ripped us off since the Athlon won for 3 years straight. Even then, they weren't getting real rich. Just making the profits they should have deserved. Check their 10yr profit summary and you'll see, they have lost 6bil. So I'd have to say they are NOT pricing/clocking their chips correctly, at least for this generation. These guys need to start making more money or they're going to be in bankruptcy by 2014 xmas.
Last 12 months= sales 6.38bil = PROFITS= - 629 million! They aren't gouging us...They are losing their collective A$$es :(
http://investing.money.msn.com/investments/stock-p...
That's a LOSS of 629 million. Go back 10yrs its about a 6.x billion loss.
While I hate the way Ryan did his review, AMD needs all the help they can get I guess... :) But Ryan needs to redo his recommendation (or lack of one) because he just looks like a buffoon when no monitors sell at 2560x1600 (30inchers? only 11, and less than this res), and steampowered.com shows less than 2% use this res also. He looks foolish at best not recommending based on 1920x1200 results which 98% of us use. He also needs to admit that Warhead is from 2008, and should have used Crysis 2 which is using an engine based on 27 games instead of CryEngine 2 from 2007 and only 7 games based on it. It's useless.
Galidou - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
''profits they should have deserved''You speak like if they had to overcome Intel and Nvidia's performance is easy and it's all their fault because they work bad. AMD got a wonderful team, you speak like you ever worked there and they don't do shit, they sit on their chair and that's the result of their work.
Well it isn't, if you wanan speak like that about AMD, do it if you work there. No one is better placed to say if a company is really good or bad than the employees themselves. So just stop speaking like if designing these over 3 billions transistor things is as easy as saying ''hello, my name is Nvidia fanboy and AMD is crap''.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
AMD is crap. It's crap man, no getting around it.Galidou - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
Too late Cerise, you lost all credibility by not being able to have an objective(it means it is undistorted by emotions) opinion and you rather proved you're way too much emotive to speak about video cards manufacturer.You too speak like if you ever worked at AMD and sure it is not the case, just visiting their headquarters would make your eyes bleed because in your world, this place is related to hell, with an ambient temperature averaging 200 degrees celsius, surrounded by walls of flesh, where torture is a common thing. And in the end, the demons poop video cards and force you to buy or kill your family.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
Your opinion - " i'm did my research ima getting my 7950 for my triple monitor SKYRIM..."Take a look at your 7950 SKYRIM LOSS in triple monitor to the 660Ti and the 660Ti also beats the 7950 boost and the 7970 !
5760x1080 4x aa 16x af
ROFLMAO !
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/08/16/nvidia...
There isn't a palm big enough in the world to cover your face.