NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Review: Bringing Balance To The Force
by Ryan Smith on March 26, 2013 8:00 AM ESTSynthetics
As always we’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance to get a better look at our video cards' underpinnings. These tests are mostly for comparing cards from within a manufacturer, as opposed to directly comparing AMD and NVIDIA cards.
We’ll start with 3DMark Vantage’s Pixel Fill test, a mix of a ROP test and a bandwidth test to see if you have enough bandwidth to feed those ROPs.
3DMark Vantage’s pixel fill test confirms what we know from the specs of the GTX 650 Ti Boost: that it has received a massive boost in ROP performance and memory bandwidth. The 45% greater pixel throughput rate here doesn’t reach the kind of lofty goals that the theoreticals would put it at, but it’s clearly quite an improvement. Interestingly despite the equal ROP throughput and memory bandwidth of the GTX 660 and GTX 650 Ti Boost, the GTX 660 is still clearly in the lead here. We’ve never looked at the impact of GPCs here, so if our card is a 2 GPC model then this might explain what we’re seeing.
Moving on, we have our 3DMark Vantage texture fillrate test, which does for texels and texture mapping units what the previous test does for ROPs.
Texture fillrates on the other hand are really only benefitting from the higher clockspeeds of the GTX 650 Ti Boost over the GTX 650 Ti, and memory bandwidth to a much lesser extent. This is why despite the similarities between the GTX 650 Ti Boost and the GTX 660, the latter is still quite safe from the GTX 650 Ti Boost.
Finally we’ll take a quick look at tessellation performance with TessMark. We have everything turned up to maximum here, which means we're looking at roughly 11 million polygons per frame.
NVIDIA has always had a fairly ridiculous geometry throughput rate, and that doesn’t change on the GTX 650 Ti Boost. A score of 753 is second only to the GTX 660, and well ahead of the 7850, which is an interesting confluence of a 2 primative/clock rate, and its lower clockspeeds relative to the 7790 and GTX 650 Ti Boost.
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Hrel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
More realistically, price the GTX660 at MOST 180. I can find 7850's for 160, from XFX no less.Anandtech, please add an "edit" function to you comments. Also, I want an email when someone responds to me. Then to be able to click a link that takes me directly to that comment, instead of having to plow through 100's of comments.
CiccioB - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
nvidia prices its solutions at the price it think they are best. If GTX660 sells like cookies, why on earth should they lower the price? To have a red quarter like AMD?And possibly they have quite a few GK106 with just some shaders dead but the memory controller completely working. So those pieces would have to be sold at GTX650 Ti price. With this move they can sell them with a bit of premium price.
Consider that for nvidia this new board costed zero, while AMD had to forge a new chip, which has a cost.
Hrel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
It'd be nice to Just Cause 2 in your benchmarks. It has a built in benchmark and everything. Awesome game people will be playing for years, considering they added multi-player. I know you're still working on the benchmark suite, so this is a suggestion I'd really like to see.Hrel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
nice to see*Holy Batman do you guys need to add an edit function to your comments.
aTonyAtlaw - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
I would posit that perhaps you need to proofread your comments more than Anandtech needs to provide an edit function.skiboysteve - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
its good to keep in mind that open air coolers can be very loud if you dont have a well ventilated case like me. I have a 6850 with an open air cooler and the thing is VERY loud because it gets so crazy hot inside my case. If I had a blower on it, it wouldn't be nearly as loudmarc1000 - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
where is Starcraft II ? it's no longer part of the test suite?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Yes, it was removed. It gets rather silly on high-end cards these days, which is what we base our benchmark selections on.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
How about Skyrim with the high resolution textures? I've heard that that requires 2 GB to run decently. That would be nice to see tested when the silly 1 GB card is released.warezme - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
I think it would be interesting to also post mobile GPU numbers along with these cards. In this field of models there is some relevance related to how the two types would perform in similar games as a comparison.