Metro: 2033

Paired with Crysis as our second behemoth FPS is Metro: 2033. Metro gives up Crysis’ lush tropics and frozen wastelands for an underground experience, but even underground it can be quite brutal on GPUs, which is why it’s also our new benchmark of choice for looking at power/temperature/noise during a game. If its sequel due this year is anywhere near as GPU intensive then a single GPU may not be enough to run the game with every quality feature turned up.

Metro is another game that has been favoring AMD’s GCN architecture over NVIDIA’s Kepler architecture, albeit less so than Crysis. The results still have the GTX 660 Ti struggling, but now it’s at least clearly ahead of the 7870, beating it by 7%. The 7950 however leads by similar 7%, which means the GTX 660 Ti is splitting the difference and is not competitive enough in this game.

The factory overclocked cards on the other hand show us that there is some hope for GTX 660 Ti, even with its memory bus castration. Both the Gigabyte and Zotac cards can edge out the 7950, an important distinction since they need to justify costing about as much as a 7950. At the same time this is part of the reason why AMD felt the need to do the 7950B, since only the B can outpace overclocked GTX 660 Ti 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

    lolwut
  • Omega215D - 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

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