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 |
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claysm - Friday, August 24, 2012 - link
I absolutely will ignore driver support for the 6 series cards. If you are using an AGP card, it's really REALLY time to upgrade.You are just as bad a fanboy for nVidia as any AMD guy here, moron. You are completely ignoring anything good about AMD just because it has AMD attached to it.
I'm completely confident that if AMD had introduced adaptive v-sync and PhysX, you would still say they suck, just because they came from AMD. If you read my post, it says that 660 Ti IS more powerful than the 7870. I was just pointing out that they are closer than they seem. I have no nVidia hatred, they have a lot of cool stuff.
And about the 660 Ti beating the 7950 at 5760x1080, look at the other three benchmarks, moron. The 7950 wins all of them, meaning BF3, Dirt 3, and Crysis 2. It only looses in Skyrim by and average of 2 FPS. Why didn't you include those games in your response.
And when I left the games out, I said that they merely blew the average out of proportion, but that you can't leave them out because you want to. You still have to calculate them in the total. Moron.
And for the record, I'm running a GTX 570, moron.
CeriseCogburn - Friday, August 24, 2012 - link
Look, the amd crew, you, talk your crap of lies, then I correct you.That's why.
Now, whatever you have that is "good by amd" go ahead and state it. Don't tell lies, don't spin, don't talk crap.
I'm waiting...
My guess is I'll have to correct your lies again, and your STUPID play dumb amnesia.
The reason one game was given with 660Ti in that highest resolution winning is very obvious, isn't it, the endless your bud giradou or geradil or geritol whatever his name is was claiming that's the game he was buying the 7950 for...
LOL
ROFL
MHO
Whatever - do your worst.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, August 25, 2012 - link
" Fan noise of the card is very low in both idle and load, and temperatures are fine as well.Overall, MSI did an excellent job improving on the NVIDIA reference design, resulting in a significantly better card. The card's price of $330 is the same as all other GTX 660 Ti cards we reviewed today. At that price the card easily beats AMD's HD 7950 in all important criteria: performance, power, noise, heat, performance per Dollar, performance per Watt. "
LOL
power target 175W LOL
" It seems that MSI has added some secret sauce, no other board partner has, to their card's BIOS. One indicator of this is that they raised the card's default power limit from 130 W to 175 W, which will certainly help in many situations. During normal gaming, we see no increased power consumption due to this change. The card essentially uses the same power as other cards, but is faster - leading to improved performance per Watt.< br />Overclocking works great as well and reaches the highest real-life performance, despite not reaching the lowest GPU clock. This is certainly an interesting development. We will, hopefully, see more board partners pick up this change. "
Uh OH
bad news for you amd fanboys.....
HAHAHHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
The MSI 660Ti is uncorked from the bios !
roflmao
Ambilogy - Friday, August 24, 2012 - link
"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% !"
So you have not a problem with performance? good, because actually that means its a competitive card, not a omfg card. And if you want to oc a 660 you would just oc a 7950 so I don't see the omfg nvidia is so much better.
"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 ?"
So essentially when i ask how many people do actually 3D because you seem to think 2% is unimportant in resolution your answer is "well nvidia is 10 ahead because it has features ACCEPT BLINDLY". Not smart.
"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."
FPS are gone and future is fantasy? amd cards still perfom, they are very gpgpu focused and they do excellent for that, and still they don't have bad gaming performance while doing it because you just buy a pre OC version or something and you get still awesome performance (very similar to your 660ti god), say to me what is not enjoyable while playing with an AMD card mr fanboy.
And the future, well, future is gpgpu because allows big improvements to computing, yet is "fantasy". It's only non important because nvidia had good gpgpu in the past and not now?
"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.."
Yeah, calling fan-boy before actually noticing that nvidia told the reviewers how to review the card so it looked better, because get realist, if they include a horrible AA technique with no reason at all something is behind the table hiding you know. Haven't you noticed? theres a lot of discrepancy in 660ti's benchmarks around the web, from sites where the 660 loses to 870's radeons and where it wins to 970's, there is not a single liable review now, do you want to see the truth? buy a 660ti a 870 and a 950, and compare the 3, you will have the truth, thay they perform like they are priced and AMD cards are not shit.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, August 25, 2012 - link
Hey, I answered the guys 3 questions. I made my points. I didn't say half of what you're talking about, but who cares.
The guy killed himself with point #1, so that's the end of it.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, August 25, 2012 - link
Oh stop the crap. nVidia is 10 features ahead, I'm not the one who talked about resolution usage, so you've got the wrong fellow there.3D isn't the only feature... but then you know that, but will blabber like an idiot anyway.
Go away.
claysm - Saturday, August 25, 2012 - link
"I'm not the one who talked about resolution usage". You can't fault him for mixing up his trolls. Since almost everything you and TheJian have said is complete shit it's hard to keep track of who said what.And if you can objectively prove that I've lied about anything, I really would like to see it. And I mean objectively, not your usual response of entirely subjective 'AMD suckz lololol' presented in almost unreadably bad grammar.
I take that back, I won't read it anyways, since I know already know it'll be an nVidia love fest regardless of what the facts state. And I'll reiterate that I'm using an nVidia card. Moron.
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, August 25, 2012 - link
Oh it is not, he showed it all to be true and so does the review man.Get out of your freaking goggled amd fanboy gourd.
Look, I just realized another thing that doesn't bode well for you..
What nVidia did here was make a very good move, and the losses of amd on the Steam Hardware Survey at the top end are going to increase....
The amd fanboy is constantly crying about price - they're going to look at $299 with the excellent new game for free and PASS on the more expensive 7950 Russian is promoting EVEN MORE now.
Here let me get you the little info you're now curious about. ( I hope but maybe you're just a scowling amd fanboy liar still completely uninterested because you never got 1 fact according to you LOL sad what you are it's sad)
Aug 15th 2012 prdola0
" Looking at Steam Survey, it is clear why AMD is so desperate. GTX680 has 0.90% share, while even the 7850 lineup has less, just 0.62%. If you look at the GTX670, it has 0.99%. The HD7970 has only 0.54%, about half of what GTX680 has, which is funny considering that the GTX680 is selling only half the time compared to HD7970. It means that GTX680 is selling 4 times faster."
ROFL...
No one is listening to you fools, Russian included... now it's going to GET WORSE for amd....
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, August 25, 2012 - link
forgot link, sorry, page 2 commenthttp://www.anandtech.com/show/6152/amd-announces-n...
Okay, and that stupid 7950 boost REALLY IS CRAPPY CHIPS from the low end loser harvest they had to OVER VOLT to get to their boost...
LOL
LOL\
OLO
I mean there it is man - the same JUNK amd fanboys always use to attack nVida talking about rejected chips for lower clocked down the line variants has NOW COME TRUE IN FULL BLOWN REALITY FOR AMD....~!
HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA
AHHAHAHAHAHAA
omg !
hahahahahahhahaha
ahhahaha
ahaha
Holy moly. hahahahahhahahha
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
plus here the 660Ti wins in 5760x1080, beating the 7950 the 7950 boost, and the 7970...http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/08/16/nvidia...
Skyrim. So, throw that out too - add skyrim to your too short shortlist. Throw out your future mem whine. throw out your OC whine readied for 660Ti...
Yep. So the argument left is " I wuv amd ! " - or the more usual " I OWS nVidia ! " ( angry face )