The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Review: GK106 Fills Out The Kepler Family
by Ryan Smith on September 13, 2012 9:00 AM ESTCivilization V
Our final game, Civilization 5, gives us an interesting look at things that other RTSes cannot match, with a much weaker focus on shading in the game world, and a much greater focus on creating the geometry needed to bring such a world to life. In doing so it uses a slew of DirectX 11 technologies, including tessellation for said geometry, driver command lists for reducing CPU overhead, and compute shaders for on-the-fly texture decompression.
Civilization V was once a game that favored NVIDIA’s hardware, but with AMD’s GCN architecture that is no more. Coming from the GTX 660 Ti the GTX 660 takes a moderate 13% performance hit, but this only widens the gap between the GTX 660 series and the 7870, which was already the highest performing card out of this bunch. As a result AMD’s GTX 660 competitor leads by 17%, or put reciprocally the GTX 660 trails by 15%. In fact the GTX 660 doesn’t do much better than even the 7850 here, leading by just 6%.
Given Civilization V’s reliance on Compute Shader performance, it comes as no great surprise that this is also one of the weakest showings for the GTX 660 relative to the GTX 460. The GTX 660 ends up being only 45% faster than the GTX 460, the smallest improvement out of any game we’ve tested.
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Margalus - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
you say the stock 660 looks bad when compared to an overclocked 7870? what a shock that is!I guess it's always fair to say an nvidia card is bad when comparing the stock reference nv card to overclocked versions of it's nearest amd competitor..
Patflute - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
Be fair and over clock both...poohbear - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
well after reading this im still have with my Gigabyte OC gtx 670 i got 2 months ago for $388. I will NOT be upgrading for 3 years & im confident my GTX 670 will still be in the upper segment in 3 years (like my 5870 that i upgraded from), so @ $130/yr its a great deal.poohbear - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
erm, i meant i'm still happy*. sucks that u can't edit on these comments.:pKineticHummus - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
i had no idea what you meant with your "im still happy" edit until I went back to read your original statement again. somehow I mentally replaced the "have" with "happy" lol. reading fail for me...distinctively - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Looks like the 660 is getting a nasty little spanking from the 7870 when you look around at all the reviews. The GK 106 appears to loose in just about every metric compared to Pitcairn.Locateneil - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
I just built a PC with 3770K and Asus Z77-v Pro, I was think to buy GTX 670 for my system but now I am now confused if it is better to go with 2 GTX 660 in SLI?Ryan Smith - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
Our advice has always been to prefer a single more powerful card over a pair of weaker cards in SLI. SLI is a great mechanism to extend performance beyond what a single card can provide, but its inconsistent performance and inherent drawbacks (need for SLI profiles and microstuttering) means that it's not a good solution for when you can have a single, more powerful GPU.knghtwhosaysni - Thursday, September 13, 2012 - link
Do you guys think you could show frametimes like techreport does in your reviews? It can show some deficiencies in rendering that average FPS doesn't, like with Crysis 2 http://techreport.com/review/23527/nvidia-geforce-...It's nice that techreport does it, but I think Anandtech is the first stop for a lot of people who are looking for benchmarks, and I think if you guys showed this data in your own reviews then it would really push AMD and Nvidia to iron out their latency spike problems.
Ryan Smith - Friday, September 14, 2012 - link
We get asked this a lot. I really like Scott's methodology there, so if we were to do this I'd want to do more than just copy him by finding some way to do better than him (which is no easy task).To that end I find FRAPS to be at a higher level than I'd like. It's measuring when frames are handed off to the GPU rather than when the GPU actually finishes the frame. These times are strongly correlated, but I'd rather have more definitive low-level data from the GPU itself. If we could pull that off then frametimes are definitely something we'd look in to.