The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Review: GK106 Fills Out The Kepler Family
by Ryan Smith on September 13, 2012 9:00 AM ESTStarcraft II
Our next game is Starcraft II, Blizzard’s 2010 RTS megahit. Much like Portal 2 it’s a DX9 game designed to run on a wide range of hardware so performance is quite peppy with most high-end cards, but it can still challenge a GPU when it needs to.
With the release of patch 1.5, Blizzard turned both our Starcraft II testing methodology and our Starcraft II benchmark results on their heads. After straightening things out a curious pattern emerged: NVIDIA’s cards came out relatively unscathed, while most AMD GCN cards have taken a small performance hit compared to our earlier results. As a result Starcraft II now favors NVIDIA’s cards even more so now than it did before, making this an easy win for the GTX 660. At 1920 the GTX 660 beats the 7870 by 37%, and once more even the 7950 falls behind.
The driving factor here seems to be ROP performance, as showcased by the performance of the GTX 660 relative to that of the GTX 660 Ti. This is a textbook case of the GTX 660’s slightly higher ROP performance giving it an equally slight performance advantage over the GTX 660 Ti, and also explaining why performance hasn’t dropped to near-7870 levels like we’ve seen in some other games. With the next Starcraft II chapter already in beta testing, it will be interesting to see if these kinds of performance differences will remain into the future.
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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.