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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CeriseCogburn - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
If they can't supply it - it cannot lower competitor prices, and can't be bought, so they make little or no money, and everyone else buys the available competitors product.Why doesn't AMD release a card that drives down the 680's price $170 per card and makes nVidia give away 3 free games with it too ?
That would make too much sense for amd and we consumers and some competition that crushes evil corporate profiteering nVidia, so AMD should do it.
(roll eyes)
To answer your question> nVidia is being nice not draining all the red blood from amd's jugular since amd is bleeding out so badly already that if nVidia took them out a million raging in 3d fanboys would scream for billions in payola in a giant lawsuit they protest for in front of the UN and the IMF and the International Court and the 25k persons traveling EURO unelected power bureaucrats.
So instead of all that terribleness and making amd fans cry, nVidia is nice about it.
Galidou - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
This card at 249$ would be very bad for AMD but not very good for Nvidia either. Considering how close it already is to it's bigger brother, it would probably cut a good percentage of gtx 670 sales.So yeah, 249$ might seem a good price for US but they don't want to harm themselves either.
Belard - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
What does TI mean?Where is the GTX 660? So its really a 670 with a hand chopped off?
ericloewe - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
TI means something along the lines of "We'll release a crap version later on that only OEMs will buy, called the GTX 660."Patflute - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
lolwutOmega215D - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
I think it still means "Titanium" version of a chip which was supposedly better than the non-Ti.MrSpadge - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
It means "We can't figure out how to distinguish our products using 3 decimal numbers and up to 3 letters in front of it (or the lack thereof), so we'll add some more letters".R3MF - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
in the anand review of the 450 where Nvidia first showed the lopsided memory bus arrangement it was noted that CUDA apps would not recognise the full memory complement.has this now been fixed?
Ryan Smith - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Yes. That was fixed almost immediately.R3MF - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
thanks Ryan