The GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review, Feat. EVGA, Zotac, and Gigabyte
by Ryan Smith on August 16, 2012 9:00 AM ESTThe Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Bethesda's epic sword & magic game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is our RPG of choice for benchmarking. It's altogether a good CPU benchmark thanks to its complex scripting and AI, but it also can end up pushing a large number of fairly complex models and effects at once, especially with the addition of the high resolution texture pack.
For every Portal 2 you have a Skyrim, it seems. At 1920 the GTX 660 Ti actually does well for itself here, besting the 7900 series, but we know from experience that this is a CPU limited resolution. Cranking things up to 2560 and Ultra quality sends the GTX 660 Ti through the floor in a very bad way, pushing it well below even the 7870, never mind the 7900 series.
Altogether the GTX 660 Ti achieves about 80% of the performance of the GTX 670, making this another game that is hurt badly by the loss of a ROP block and memory bandwidth. At the same time the GTX 670 is the first NVIDIA card fast enough to compete with the 7950, so the GTX 660 Ti came into this benchmark with unfavorable odds. 68fps is more than playable, but hardcore Skyrim players are going to want to stick to cards with more memory bandwidth. At best, the bright spot for NVIDIA is that the GTX 660 Ti is nearly 100% faster than the GTX 560 Ti, a remarkable improvement, but also one being fueled by the meager 1GB of VRAM the latter has.
As for our factory overclocked cards, this is another case of Zotac leading the pack. Its memory overclock is exactly what’s needed to counter the GTX 660 Ti’s lack of memory bandwidth, which helps it easily clear EVGA and Gigabyte’s cards.
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Oxford Guy - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
What is with the 285 being included? It's not even a DX 11 card.Where is the 480? Why is the 570 included instead of the 580?
Where is the 680?
Ryan Smith - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
The 285 was included because I wanted to quickly throw in a GTX 285 card where applicable, since NVIDIA is promoting the GTX 660 Ti as a GTX 200 series upgrade. Basically there was no harm in including it where we could.As for the 480, it's equivalent to the 570 in performance (eerily so), so there's never a need to break it out separately.
And the 680 is in Bench. It didn't make much sense to include a card $200 more expensive which would just compress the results among the $300 cards.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
So you're saying the 680 is way faster than the 7970 which you included in every chart, since the 7970 won't compress those $300 card results.Thanks for admitting that the 7970 is so much slower.
Pixelpusher6 - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
Thanks Ryan. Great review as always.I know one of the differentiating factors for the Radeon 7950s is the 3GB of ram but I was curious are there any current games which will max out 2GB of RAM with high resolution, AA, etc.?
I think it's interesting how similar AMDs and Nvidias GPUs are this generation. I believe Nvidia will be releasing the GTX 660 non Ti based on GK106. Leaked specs seem to be similar to this card but the texture units will be reduced to 64. I wonder how much of a performance reduction this will account for. I think it will be hard for Nvidia to get the same type of performance / $ as say GTX 460 / 560 Ti this generation because of having to have GK104 fill in more market segments.
Also I wasn't aware that Nvidia was still having trouble meeting demand with GK104 chips I thought those issues were all cleared up. I think when AMD released their 7000 series chips they should have taken advantage of being first to market and been more competitive on price to grow market share rather than increase margins. At that time someone sitting on 8800GT era hardware would be hard pressed to upgrade knowing that AMDs inflated prices would come down once Nvidia brought their GPUs to market. People who hold on to their cards for a number of years is unlikely to upgrade 6 months later to Nvidias product. If AMD cards were priced lower at this time a lot more people would have bought them, thereby beating Nvidia before they even have a card to market. I do give some credit to AMD for preparing for this launch and adjusting prices, but in my opinion this should have been done much earlier. AMD management needs to be more aggressive and catch Nvidia off guard, rather than just reacting to whatever they do. I would "preemptively" strike at the GTX 660 non Ti by lowering prices on the 7850 to $199. Instead it seems they'll follow the trend and keep it at $240-250 right up until the launch of the GTX 660 then lower it to $199.
Ryan Smith - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
Pixelpusher, there are no games we test that max out 2GB of VRAM out of the box. 3GB may one day prove to be advantageous, but right even at multi-monitor resolutions 2GB is doing the job (since we're seeing these cards run out of compute/render performance before they run out of RAM).Sudarshan_SMD - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
Where are naked images of the card?CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
You don't undress somebody you don't love.dalearyous - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
it seems the biggest disappointment i see in comments is the price point.but if this card comes bundled with borderlands 2, and you were already planning on buying borderlands 2 then this puts the card at $240, worth it IMO.
rarson - Friday, August 17, 2012 - link
but it's the middle of freaking August. While Tahiti was unfortunately clocked a bit lower than it probably should have been, and AMD took a bit too long to bring out the GE edition cards, Nvidia is now practically 8 months behind AMD, having only just released a $300 card. (In the 8 months that have gone by since the release of the 7950, its price has dropped from $450 to $320, effectively making it a competitor to the 660 Ti. AMD is able to compete on price with a better-performing card by virtue of the fact that it simply took Nvidia too damn long to get their product to market.) By the time the bottom end appears, AMD will be ready for Canary Islands.It's bad enough that Kepler (and Fermi, for that matter) was so late and so not available for several months, but it's taking forever to simply roll out the lower-tier products (and yes, I know 28nm wafers have been in short supply, but that's partially due to Nvidia's crappy Kepler yields... AMD have not had such supply problems). Can you imagine what would have happened if Nvidia actually tried to release GK110 as a consumer card? We'd have NOTHING. Hot, unmanufacturable nothing.
Nvidia needs to get their shit together. At the rate they're going, they'll have to skip an entire generation just to get back on track. I liked the 680 because it was a good performer, but that doesn't do consumers any good when it's 4 months late to the party and almost completely unavailable. Perhaps by the end of the year, 28nm will have matured enough and Nvidia will be able to design something that yields decently while still offering the competitiveness that the 680 brought us, because what I'd really like to see is both companies releasing good cards at the same time. Thanks to Fermi and Kepler, that hasn't happened for a while now. Us consumers benefit from healthy competition and Nvidia has been screwing that up for everyone. Get it together, Nvidia!
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
So as any wacko fanboy does, you fault nVidia for releasing a card later that drives the very top end tier amd cards down from the 579+ shipping I paid to $170 less plus 3 free games.Yeah buddy, it's all nVidia's fault, and they need to get their act together, and if they do in fact get their act together, you can buy the very top amd card for $150, because that's likely all it will be worth.
Good to know it's all nVidia's fault. AMD from $579+plus ship to $409 and 3 free games and nVidia sucks for not having it's act together.
The FDA as well as the EPA should ban the koolaid you're drinking.