The GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review, Feat. EVGA, Zotac, and Gigabyte
by Ryan Smith on August 16, 2012 9:00 AM ESTSynthetics
We’ll also take a quick look at synthetic performance to see if the reduction in ROP performance, L2 cache, and memory bandwidth had any kind of other impact we haven’t anticipated. We’ll start with 3DMark Vantage’s Pixel Fill test.
Assuming you have enough ROP throughput, the pixel fill test is about memory bandwidth. Unsurprisingly, the GTX 660 Ti is around 20% behind the GTX 670 here.
Our second test is 3DMark’s Texel Fill test, which as expected is insensitive to anything going on outside of the SMXes. The GTX 670 and GTX 660 Ti are tied here, reflecting the fact that they have equal theoretical texture throughput.
Our third theoretical test is the set of settings we use with Microsoft’s Detail Tessellation sample program out of the DX11 SDK
To be honest we’re not quite sure why there’s such a performance drop here relative to the GTX 670. On paper the geometry performance of the two should be identical. Either we’re ROP limited (this test does draw a lot of pixels at those framerates), or it really likes memory bandwidth. Regardless it’s an odd state of affairs to see NVIDIA losing a tessellation test to the 7870, considering how lopsided things were a year ago.
Our final theoretical test is Unigine Heaven 2.5, a benchmark that straddles the line between a synthetic benchmark and a real-world benchmark as the engine is licensed but no notable DX11 games have been produced using it yet.
Heaven proves to be rather sensitive to the ROP and memory changes. The performance hit is just shy of 20%.
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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