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 |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
313 Comments
View All Comments
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
No contribution there.claysm - Wednesday, August 22, 2012 - link
The article says that the 660 Ti is an average of 10-15% faster than the 7870, and that's true. But I feel that that average doesn't reflect how close those two cards really are in most games. If you throw out the results for Portal 2 and Battlefield 3 (since they are nVidia blowouts), the 660 Ti is only about 5% faster than the 7870.Now obviously you can't just throw those results away because you don't like them, but if you're not playing BF3 or Portal 2, then the 660 Ti and the 7870 are actually very close. And given the recent price drop of the 7870, it would definitely win the price/performance mark.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
At what resolution ?Oh, doesn't matter apparently.
claysm - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
At every resolution tested. 1680x1050, 1920x1200, and 2560x1600.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
Not true nice try though not really was patheticCeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
No PhysX, no adaptive v-sync, inferior 3D, inferior 3 panel gaming, no target frame rate, poorer IQ, the list goes on and on.you have to be a fanboy fool to buy amd, and there are a lot of fools around, you being one of them.
claysm - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
PhysX is not that great. There is only a single this year that will have PhysX support, and that is Borderlands 2. Most of the effects that PhysX adds are just smoke and more fluid and cloth dynamics. Sometimes a slightly more destructible environment.Adaptive V-Sync is cool, I saw a demonstration video of it.
Inferior 3D is true, although your next point is stupid. AMD's Eyefinity is much better than nVidia Surround.
I'm not a fanboy, Go to the bench and look at the results, do the math if you want. Barring BF3 and Portal 2, again since they are huge wins for nVidia, every other game on the list is extremely close. Of the 35 benchmarks that were run, it's the 8 from BF3 and Portal 2 that completely blow the average. The 660 Ti is more powerful, but the 7870 is a lot closer to the 660 Ti than the average would lead you to believe.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
Yeah whatever - buy the slow loser without the features, say they don't matter, get the one with crappy drivers, say that doesn't matter.. throw out a few games, say they don't matter, ignore the driver support that goes back to the nVidia 6 series, that doesn't matter, ignore the pathetic release drivers of amd, say that doesn't matter... put in the screwy amd extra download junk for taskbar control in eyefinity, pretend that doesn't matter - no bezel peek pretend that doesn't matter...DUDE - WHATEVER ... you're a FOOL to buy amd.
Ambilogy - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
"Yeah whatever"Essentially when someone said that theres 5% diference you 'just forget about it, nothings here to notice I'm busy trolling'. bullshit
"- buy the slow loser"
So for you slower loser is a little dif in framerates only in the allmyghty 19XX x 1XXX res? where everything is playable with other cards also? what when new titles come and then some stuff starts to go wrong with 660ti?. you can actually ignore the difference now and future titles could go better for AMD for opencl stuff. You should have said "a little slower now, if we are lucky, still a little slower on the future". bullshit
"without the features, say they don't matter"
I don't actually notice phyxs playing... and... if 2% of people play in very high res, how many do you think plays at your marvelous nvidia 3d? bullshit. Its like saying this is bad because only 2% uses it, and this is good but the percentage is even less. bullshit
"get the one with crappy drivers"
You read that a lot of people had amd driver issues, nice, like a lot of people also has nvidia driver issues... do you know the percentage of driver failures? the failures stand out only because normal working drivers don't drive attention. Does not mean that its plagged by bugs. bullshit.
", say that doesn't matter.. throw out a few games, say they don't matter, ignore the driver support that goes back to the nVidia 6 series, that doesn't matter, ignore the pathetic release drivers of amd, say that doesn't matter... "
Hey nice! i know how to repeat stuff that I have already said without proving anything also! look: bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The games you think matter can still be played, its future games that will tax this cards to new limits, then we will see, and if those include opencl, where will be your god? "well I could play battlefield 3 better some time ago, im sure these new games don't matter". or maybe a "yeah whatever" ? :)
And im tyred now, I think this card is a fail, what does it do that cards already didn't do? what market do they cover that was not previously covered?
OH NO BUT WE HAVE BETTER FPS FOR MAIN RESOLUTIONS
Well, good luck with that in the future... I'm sure a man will buy a good 7950 with factory oc that will go just about as well, still playable and nice, and when the future comes then what? you can cry, cry hard.
You cannot accept that your card is:
1. Easy to equalize in performance, with little performance difference in most games or actually none if OC is considered.
2. Focused on the marketing of some today games and completely forgot about future, memory bandwidth and so on.
3. Overly marketised by nvidia.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
You cannot accept (your lies) that your card is:1. Easy to equalize in performance, with little performance difference in most games or actually none if OC is considered.
I don't have a problem with that. 660Ti is hitting 1300+ on core and 7000+ on memory, and so you have a problem with that.
The general idea you state, though I'M ALL FOR IT MAN!
A FEW FPS SHOULD NOT BE THE THING YOU FOCUS ON, ESPECIALLY WHEN #1 ! ALL FOR IT ! 100% !
Thus we get down to the added features- whoops ! nVidia is about 10 ahead on that now. That settles it.
Hello ? Can YOU accept THAT ?
If FOLLOWS 100% from your #1
I'd like an answer about your acceptance level.
2. Focused on the marketing of some today games and completely forgot about future, memory bandwidth and so on.
Nope, it's already been proven it's a misnomer. Cores are gone , fps is too, before memory can be used. In the present, a bit faster now, cranked to the max, and FAILING on both sides with CURRENT GAMES - but some fantasy future is viable ? It's already been aborted.
You need to ACCEPT THAT FACT.
The other possibility would be driver enhancements, but both sides do that, and usually nvidia does it much better, and SERVICES PAST CARDS all the way back to 6 series AGP so amd loses that battle "years down the road" - dude...
Accept or not ? Those are current facts.
3. Overly marketised by nvidia. "
Okay, so whatever that means...all I see is insane amd fanboysim - that's the PR call of the loser - MARKETING to get their failure hyped - hence we see the mind infected amd fanboys everywhere, in fact, you probably said that because you have the pr pumped nVidia hatred.
Here's an example of "marketised""
http://www.verdetrol.com/
ROFL - your few and far between and dollars still hard at work.
AMD adverts your butt in CCC - install and bang - the ads start flowing right onto your CCC screen...
Is that " Overly marketised" ?
I'm sorry you're going to have to do much better than that.