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.
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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