The GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review, Feat. EVGA, Zotac, and Gigabyte
by Ryan Smith on August 16, 2012 9:00 AM ESTCivilization V
Our final game, Civilization 5, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
Amusingly enough our final game sees the GTX 660 Ti and 7950 tied at roughly 67fps. If you want a brief summary of where this is going, there you go. Though the fact that the GTX 660 Ti actually increases its lead at 2560 is unexpected.
Finally, our factory overclocked cards offer mixed results. The Gigabyte card is once again in the lead, indicating that Civilization V isn’t particularly memory bandwidth bound as opposed to shader/texture bound. This leaves the Zotac card and finally the EVGA card bringing up the rear. At the same time the Gigabyte card only improves by 8%, which is less than some of the improvements we’ve seen in other games.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
313 Comments
View All Comments
Ryan Smith - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Long story short, we were having CMS problems earlier so we were messing with the URL slugs. Not that the slugs actually matter, but it's been fixed.Belard - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Slugs are important for soil health. slimy and kind of icky looking... they are good to have.Natfly - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Not to mention search engine optimizationBelard - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I see that.... oops.bhima - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
You show $399, but the MSRP is $319.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
A lot of em are going for $299, but why put anything in there but RELEASE PRICE on the chart - that way you can show the GTX570 at $349.Bias ? You decide.
BoloMKXXVIII - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
blanarahul, very insiteful comment.The GTX 660 Ti seems like a good "bang for your buck" card. NVidia should count itself lucky for having trouble keeping up with demand. My worry is they lose focus with the number of markets they are trying to fill. Something I am sure AMD will be watching for.
CeriseCogburn - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
Yes nVidia sure loses focus - uhh... loses focus...sales GREAT - loses focus...Biased stupidity ?
You decide.
What it means ?
No one knows.
Galidou - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
They're not loosing focus, it's a new strategy and it must work wonders. Instead of releasing new products as quickly as possible and fill the market with all the parts from low to high-end performance, they get out the new higher-end parts and rely on their last gen cards to fill the holes.Clean out the shelves so dealers don't get stuck with older technology not selling. And at the same time, not taxing new fabrication process(28nm in this case) by needing alot more to fill demand in every way.
Crazyeyeskillah - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
If they had released this at 249$ they would have never been able to supply the demand. . .why not just go for the jugular of amd? Oh yeah balance and perceived value in the market, only hurts us really.