The GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review, Feat. EVGA, Zotac, and Gigabyte
by Ryan Smith on August 16, 2012 9:00 AM ESTCompute Performance
Shifting gears, as always our final set of real-world benchmarks is a look at compute performance. As we have seen with GTX 680 and GTX 670, GK104 appears to be significantly less balanced between rendering and compute performance than GF110 or GF114 were, and as a result compute performance suffers. Cache and register file pressure in particular seem to give GK104 grief, which means that GK104 can still do well in certain scenarios, but falls well short in others. For GTX 660 Ti in particular, this is going to be a battle between the importance of shader performance – something it has just as much of as the GTX 670 – and cache/memory pressure from losing that ROP cluster and cache.
Our first compute benchmark comes from Civilization V, which uses DirectCompute to decompress textures on the fly. Civ V includes a sub-benchmark that exclusively tests the speed of their texture decompression algorithm by repeatedly decompressing the textures required for one of the game’s leader scenes. Note that this is a DX11 DirectCompute benchmark.
For Civilization V memory bandwidth and cache are clearly more important than raw compute performance in this test. Although this isn’t a worst case scenario outcome for the GTX 660 Ti, it drops substantially from the GTX 670. As a result its compute performance is barely better than the GTX 560 Ti, which wasn’t a strong performer at compute in the first place.
Our next benchmark is SmallLuxGPU, the GPU ray tracing branch of the open source LuxRender renderer. We’re now using a development build from the version 2.0 branch, and we’ve moved on to a more complex scene that hopefully will provide a greater challenge to our GPUs.
Ray tracing likes memory bandwidth and cache, which means another tough run for the GTX 660 Ti. In fact it’s now slower than the GTX 560 Ti. Compared to the 7950 this isn’t even a contest. GK104 is generally bad at compute, and GTX 660 Ti is turning out to be especially bad.
For our next benchmark we’re looking at AESEncryptDecrypt, an OpenCL AES encryption routine that AES encrypts/decrypts an 8K x 8K pixel square image file. The results of this benchmark are the average time to encrypt the image over a number of iterations of the AES cypher.
The GTX 660 Ti does finally turn things around on our AES benchmark, thanks to the fact that it generally favors NVIDIA. At the same time the gap between the GTX 670 and GTX 660 Ti is virtually non-existent.
Our fourth benchmark is once again looking at compute shader performance, this time through the Fluid simulation sample in the DirectX SDK. This program simulates the motion and interactions of a 16k particle fluid using a compute shader, with a choice of several different algorithms. In this case we’re using an (O)n^2 nearest neighbor method that is optimized by using shared memory to cache data.
The compute shader fluid simulation provides the GTX 660 Ti another bit of reprieve, although like other GK104 cards it’s still relatively weak. Here it’s virtually tied with the GTX 670 so it’s clear that it isn’t being impacted by cache or memory bandwidth losses, but it needs about 10% more to catch the 7950.
Finally, we’re adding one last benchmark to our compute run. NVIDIA and the Folding@Home group have sent over a benchmarkable version of the client with preliminary optimizations for GK104. Folding@Home and similar initiatives are still one of the most popular consumer compute workloads, so it’s something NVIDIA wants their GPUs to do well at.
Interestingly Folding @ Home proves to be rather insensitive to the differences between the GTX 670 and GTX 660 Ti, which is not what we would have expected. The GTX 660 Ti isn’t doing all that much better than the GTX 570, once more reflecting that GK104 is generally struggling with compute performance, but it’s not a bad result.
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CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
I really didn't read your rant just skimmed your crybaby whine.So who cares you had an emotional blowout. Take some midol.
Galidou - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
Attacking and attacking again, you have so much respect it's almost admirable. Respect is the most important thing in the world, if you can't have some for even people you don't know, I'm sorry but you're missing on something here.Galidou - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
I love it when people state their disrespectful opinion as a fact. Really drives their point home, yep.CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
Take a look at your 7950 SKYRIM LOSS in triple monitor to the 660Ti and the 660Ti also beats the 7950 boost and the 7970 !5760x1080 4x aa 16x af
ROFLMAO !
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/08/16/nvidia...
YES, YOU DID YOUR "RESEARCH"... now you've lost every stupid argument you started. Stupid.
Galidou - Tuesday, September 4, 2012 - link
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GT...http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canu...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-66...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6159/the-geforce-gtx...
Every review shows the 660ti under EVEN the 7870 and your review shows the 660 ti performing to the level of a 7970, flawed bullscrap. Your website has a problem, the same you have, it has a choosen side aka Fanboyism.
I have both right now my wife uses the 660 ti in her pc for Guild wars 2 at 1080p and I bought the 7950 and overclocked both in my pc to test and the 7950 hands down tramples over the gtx 660 ti even both fully overclocked. I tested with skyrim on 3 monitor 5760*1080 and that's the only game I play.
Now don't get MAD, I never said the gtx 660 ti is a bad card, it works wonders. But it gets trampled at 5760*1080 in skyrim end of the line...
TheJian - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
Actually I think they need to raise the clocks, and charge more, accepting the fact they will run hotter and use more watts. At least they can get more for the product, rather than having people saying you can OC them to 1100. Clock the normals at 900/1000 and the 7970@1050/1100 or so. Then charge more. Of course Nv is putting pricing pressure on them at the same time, but this move would allow them to be worth more out of the box so it wouldn't be as unreasonable. AT out of the box right now you can't charge more because they perform so poorly against what is being sold (and benchmarked) in the stores.With NV/Intel chewing them from both ends AMD isn't making money. But I think that's their fault with the mhz/pricing they're doing to themselves. They haven't ripped us off since the Athlon won for 3 years straight. Even then, they weren't getting real rich. Just making the profits they should have deserved. Check their 10yr profit summary and you'll see, they have lost 6bil. So I'd have to say they are NOT pricing/clocking their chips correctly, at least for this generation. These guys need to start making more money or they're going to be in bankruptcy by 2014 xmas.
Last 12 months= sales 6.38bil = PROFITS= - 629 million! They aren't gouging us...They are losing their collective A$$es :(
http://investing.money.msn.com/investments/stock-p...
That's a LOSS of 629 million. Go back 10yrs its about a 6.x billion loss.
While I hate the way Ryan did his review, AMD needs all the help they can get I guess... :) But Ryan needs to redo his recommendation (or lack of one) because he just looks like a buffoon when no monitors sell at 2560x1600 (30inchers? only 11, and less than this res), and steampowered.com shows less than 2% use this res also. He looks foolish at best not recommending based on 1920x1200 results which 98% of us use. He also needs to admit that Warhead is from 2008, and should have used Crysis 2 which is using an engine based on 27 games instead of CryEngine 2 from 2007 and only 7 games based on it. It's useless.
Galidou - Tuesday, August 21, 2012 - link
''profits they should have deserved''You speak like if they had to overcome Intel and Nvidia's performance is easy and it's all their fault because they work bad. AMD got a wonderful team, you speak like you ever worked there and they don't do shit, they sit on their chair and that's the result of their work.
Well it isn't, if you wanan speak like that about AMD, do it if you work there. No one is better placed to say if a company is really good or bad than the employees themselves. So just stop speaking like if designing these over 3 billions transistor things is as easy as saying ''hello, my name is Nvidia fanboy and AMD is crap''.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
AMD is crap. It's crap man, no getting around it.Galidou - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
Too late Cerise, you lost all credibility by not being able to have an objective(it means it is undistorted by emotions) opinion and you rather proved you're way too much emotive to speak about video cards manufacturer.You too speak like if you ever worked at AMD and sure it is not the case, just visiting their headquarters would make your eyes bleed because in your world, this place is related to hell, with an ambient temperature averaging 200 degrees celsius, surrounded by walls of flesh, where torture is a common thing. And in the end, the demons poop video cards and force you to buy or kill your family.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
Your opinion - " i'm did my research ima getting my 7950 for my triple monitor SKYRIM..."Take a look at your 7950 SKYRIM LOSS in triple monitor to the 660Ti and the 660Ti also beats the 7950 boost and the 7970 !
5760x1080 4x aa 16x af
ROFLMAO !
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/08/16/nvidia...
There isn't a palm big enough in the world to cover your face.