The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Review: GK106 Fills Out The Kepler Family
by Ryan Smith on September 13, 2012 9:00 AM ESTPortal 2
Portal 2 continues the long and proud tradition of Valve’s in-house Source engine. While Source continues to be a DX9 engine, Valve has continued to upgrade it over the years to improve its quality, and combined with their choice of style you’d have a hard time telling it’s over 7 years old at this point. Consequently Portal 2’s performance does get rather high on high-end cards, but we have ways of fixing that…
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Portal 2 is that even with a $229 card performance is still high enough that we can reasonably get away with 4x SSAA. SSAA invokes a high shader performance hit, so the cost coming from the GTX 660 Ti is by no means cheap, but it’s still fast enough to average 72fps. At this framerate the GTX 660 is fast enough to beat both 7800 series cards and even the 7950, a card that by all rights should be winning here. One of these days we’ll get to the bottom of this, but time and time again we’re seeing that NVIDIA’s performance hit here from SSAA is far less than AMD’s.
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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.