The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Review: GK106 Fills Out The Kepler Family
by Ryan Smith on September 13, 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.
Even at 1920 Skyrim’s performance breaks cards down into one of two general categories: cards that have enough RAM, and cards that don’t. The performance gap between everything from the 7850 to the GTX 660 Ti is quite small, with only 7fps separating the two cards. For the GTX 660 this means that it does end up losing to the 7870, but only by 1fps. RPGs are commonly more CPU-intensive than they are GPU-intensive, and nowhere is this more evident than with Skyrim.
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MySchizoBuddy - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
If i'm a new buyer buying the older 560 at a reduced cost both be a better buy correct?Fiercé - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
While I may be in the minority, I actually check the "The Test" page of every GPU review in order to see which driver version is being used to test the hardware, as well as to get a quick mental list of 2 or 3 GPUs to watch out for in the FPS comparisons.Due to this I've noticed for this GPU review many cards are listed that don't appear anywhere in the benchmarks:
-AMD Radeon HD 6970
-AMD Radeon HD 7950B (explicitly stated over a non-B)
-AMD Radeon HD 7970
-NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570
-NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670
(Excepting all the GTX 660 Ti that of course can't be re-tested in time for a launch review, but might be useful as a "factory overclocked options" list for a reader looking at base 660 Ti performance.)
Ryan Smith - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Thanks for the heads up. I had copied that out of the GTX 660 Ti article and had not yet edited it. It has been fixed.Fiercé - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Cheers.Jamahl - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
That has the 660 faster than the 7870. Most reputable sites have the card squarely in-between the Pitcairns.Rick83 - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
It appears to me, that we should be glad, that the jump in performance is that low, as finally it seems the power wars of the last generation, when cards were dumping 200 Watts and more into your case, even when they were just higher mid-end cards, are over.Now of course that means we get slightly less of a performance boost, but at least power consumption of this card is below the level of a GTX260. That is important, as the 560Ti was relatively quite power hungry, especially once the wick on them was turned up a bit, which was being done quite liberally.
While the Performance/Dollar metric isn't that great, the performance/(dollar*power) is probably much better than last gen.
n9ntje - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
As everyone said it, nVidia is again late to the party. However, both (amd and nV) haven't done anything to improve the price/performance. First the $100 price range, now the 200?I'm sorry but since I bought my HD5750 almost 3 years(!) ago for 100 bucks. I dont get much more performance with a similair priced card. Now they are doing it the same to the 200 dollar cards..
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, November 29, 2012 - link
Welcome to the new socialist economy and 4 more years of it.Computer prices rise in the new socialist economy.
LOL
It's great, maybe AMD will get a bailout soon.
thorr2 - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
I saw the big image on the main page and thought it was a projector at first.cmdrdredd - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Performance is not bad but the pricing is still too high. Start overclocking a 7870 and the 660 looks bad imo.