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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yeeeeman - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Really, G80 was a revolution on its own. Spectacular jump in performance compared to the previous generation, and combined with 65nm process technology gave birth to some of the finest video cards.The real setback here, is the fact that the gaming industry is driven by the lowest common denominator, and we all know that consoles are the most important. They are sold in the largest quantities, and most games are designed for their power, not higher.
For PCs, games receive a DX11 treatment, with some fancy features, than enhance the quality a little bit, but it can never make up for the fact that the textures and the game is designed for a much slower platform.
So given these facts, why change my 9600GT, when it can handle pretty much everything?
steelnewfie - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
"For the 2GB GTX 660, NVIDIA has outfit the card with 8 2Gb memory modules"Should read outfitted.
Also 8 2Gb memory modules? Did you mean 2GB? Either is incorrect by my math.
If there are 8 banks should not each module be 256 MB?
Otherwise, great articles, keep up the good work!
Ryan Smith - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Individual memory modules are labeled by their capacity in bits, not bytes. So each module is 2 gigabits (Gb), which is 256MB. 8x2Gb is how the card ends up with 2 gigabytes (GB) of RAM.MrBubbles - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
Cool, I have a GTX 260 and since NVidia is deliberately breaking their driver support for games like Civ 5 I guess this is the card to get.saturn85 - Saturday, September 15, 2012 - link
nice folding@home benchmark.JWill97 - Thursday, September 27, 2012 - link
For me, I really think it's the best card you can buy at this price. Not a fan (neutral) of both NVidia or AMD, but really, at $200+ segment nvidia takes it. But I still wondering, why all reviewers aren't using Maxpayne3 as one of the game benchmark? A lot of cards would be struggle playing it.Grawbad - Friday, March 1, 2013 - link
"NVIDIA has spent a lot of time in the past couple of years worrying about the 8800GT/9800GT in particular. “The only card that matters” was a massive hit for the company straight up through 2010, which has made it difficult to get users to upgrade even 4 years later."I am one of those. I purchased a 9800 GTX and that sucker runs everything. Mind you, all my other components were quality too so I didn't bottleneck myself. But this card has run everything I have ever thrown at it.. Only recently have I had to start watching the AA a bit. Which is why I am now, 5 years later in the market for a new card. 5 Years.
Indeed, those cards were astounding.
Mine was an EVGA 9800 GTX with a lifetime warranty. Thank goodness for that as it finally went out on me this year and I had to RMA it. And now that I am looking into getting a new card it seems EVGA has dropped their lifetime warranty. That makes me sad.
Anyways, yeah, those were are are still great cards. I mean, if you picked up a 9800 GTX today, you will be able to run even the newest games. Albeit youll need to turn down aa and such, but you can still get GREAT graphics out of most anything even today.