The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Review: GK106 Fills Out The Kepler Family
by Ryan Smith on September 13, 2012 9:00 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Kicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead. It’s no longer the toughest game in our benchmark suite, but it’s still a technically complex game that has proven to be a very consistent benchmark. Thus even four years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question, and the answer continues to be “no.” While we’re closer than ever, full Enthusiast settings at a 60fps is still beyond the grasp of a single-GPU card.
Crysis has been a game that has consistently penalized Kepler for its lack of memory bandwidth. Nowhere was this more evident than the GTX 660 Ti, which thanks to its memory bus reduction took a significant hit. But as we alluded to in our introduction, there’s a corner case where the GTX 660 is going to be able to easily keep up with the GTX 660 Ti: ROP and memory bandwidth-bound situations. As a result we’re looking at the best case scenario for the GTX 660 when held up against the GTX 660 Ti, which sees the GTX 660 offer 95% of the performance of the GTX 660 Ti. Most games aren’t going to be like this, but in this one case the GTX 660 may as well be as good as the GTX 660 Ti as far as performance goes, which goes to prove just how bottlenecked Crysis is by memory bandwidth.
Looking at a more meaningful comparison, because the GTX 660 doesn’t take a memory bandwidth hit compared to the GTX 660 Ti, the resulting card is much more resource balanced which in turn impacts AMD’s ability to lead in this benchmark. AMD once again wins here with the 7870 taking the lead, but only by a relatively modest 7% margin. This is the first time we haven’t seen a comparable AMD card lead by a significant margin in this generation, which for NVIDIA is an improvement though still not a reversal of fortunes. At the same time however NVIDIA isn’t doing too much better than the 7850 here, beating AMD’s lesser 7800 by an even more modest 5%.
As for NVIDIA’s older cards, the generational performance gains are in-line with what we’ve already seen out of the other GTX 600 cards. Compared to the GTX 460 1GB for example, a card that launched over 2 years ago at the same price, performance is up by 50-60%. But unsurprisingly this is less than the performance gain going from the 8800GT to the GTX 460, a similar timeline jump that saw performance more than double. At the very least NVIDIA certainly has the 8800GT licked at this point (by nearly a factor of 4x), but this means they’re also at risk of perpetuating longer upgrade cycles for current GTX 460 owners.
Moving on to minimum framerates, our results are almost the same with one interesting twist: the GTX 660 is now beating the more expensive GTX 660 Ti. Why? As we mentioned earlier, because of the higher core clock the ROPs on the GTX 660 actually have a greater theoretical throughput than the ROPs on the GTX 660 Ti. Since we’re not seeing any other factors that would explain this difference (i.e. drivers) it’s very likely that the GTX 660’s faster ROPs are giving it the advantage here.
Though while this is enough to push the GTX 660 ahead of the GTX 660 Ti, it’s not improving the GTX 660’s situation relative to the 7800 series at all. The GTX 660 is still closer to the 7850 than it is the 7870 here.
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Jumangi - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
LOL way to try and spin AMD fanboy. The 660 is the equal of a 7870. It beats it in several tests and loses by a little in others. The $229 price is correct.Go qq somewhere else AMD dude.
Jamahl - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Actually if you read anywhere else you'll find that the 7870 wins by 5-10% in the vast majority of cases.Samus - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
I'll take Anandtech reviews over any other reviews. This site has a 15 year reputation for truth.Jamahl - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
You do that. Most other people would take the average of all the reviews, and when they did that they'd realise that once again Anandtech is an outlier for Nvidia.rarson - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
Anandtech lost that reputation years ago when everything started sounding pro-Intel/Nvidia/Apple.RussianSensation - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Raghu78 is actually right."Overall the new ASUS GeForce GTX 660 DirectCU II seems to compete well with a price comparative factory overclocked Radeon HD 7870. While the gameplay experience is mostly the same between the two video cards, for the most part the factory overclocked Radeon HD 7870 seems to take the performance lead. If you look back at every game, the overclocked Radeon HD 7870 is on top in terms of raw performance,"
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/09/13/asus_gef...
Given that NV is 7 months late, all they did here was just barely match the price/performance of a 7 months old part. Hard to get excited about that when it's mid-September 2012 and HD8000 series isn't far off now.
HisDivineOrder - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
Geforce 660 MSRP is $230. Radeon 7870 MSRP is $250. And if you're saying that the Geforce launch is unimpressive then you're probably ignoring the fact that AMD ignored price drops for the 78xx series cards for many, many months and only just when the info about the 660 and 660 Ti began to show up did they start aggressively lowering their pricing.So... what's impressive about nVidia's parts is that they brought competition which drove AMD to lower pricing so much you could today say there's nothing impressive about nVidia's pricing.
And that's what's impressive about it. You should be thanking nVidia for finally showing up to the competition.
Also, saying the "HD8000 series isn't far off now" is disingenuous if that line follows the same model as the 7000 series and staggers the launch so the low end comes midway through or at the end of 1Q 2013. We're not talking about the high end. We're talking about the mainstream variants.
And, if you truly believe your rhetoric, then AMD will price those parts as high or higher than the 78xx series showed up with in order to milk the market while nVidia's not able to keep up. So those cards again won't matter much since they won't be anywhere near the same price as these mid-$200 cards.
We don't even know if AMD won't milk this gen a while longer than they did prior generations because their strategy seems very different than the one they've used for quite a while. And with nVidia coming so late in this gen, AMD might see advantage in riding it out with parity and lower prices (while building up inventory of HD8k) to clean out their old stock.
Then one day after first quarter 2013, WHAM! HD8000 arrives in force. nVidia employees throughout the world look up from typing biased forum posts in every forum you visit and almost weep as cards in every bracket suddenly appear in the marketplace, but then a ray of hope shines through the darkness...
AMD priced everything high again. Angels sing and as Chuck Norris descends upon the clouds of awesomeness and badassness... GK110 arrives in his wake.
Ahhhh... I like this guessing game about what will happen with next gen thing.
raghu78 - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
buzz off . the majority of the reviews on the web show the HD 7870 to be faster.http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/20...
http://ht4u.net/reviews/2012/nvidia_geforce_gtx_66...
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/876-21/recapitulat...
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GT...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-66...
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/09/13/asus_gef...
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/...
Margalus - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
I selected one random choice from your links, techpowerup. Guess what, the page you linked shows the 660 has higher performance per dollar than the 7870 at all resolutions except 2560x1600Galidou - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Fun stuff, he said the ''majority'' and you look at only one of the links he sends. Replying the way you did is a little disrespectful. Next time just write: ''too long didn't read, this card ownz''.