NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Review: Bringing Balance To The Force
by Ryan Smith on March 26, 2013 8:00 AM ESTCivilization V
Our final game, Civilization V, 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 is an interesting game due to the fact that it puts the 7790, GTX 650 Ti Boost, and 7850 so close together in performance. It stresses just about everything at some point – tessellation/geometry, ROP throughput, compute, and texturing – but it’s really shading/texturing that form the biggest bottleneck here. This works out well enough for NVIIDA, allowing them to get within 4% of the 7850, while still keeping the GTX 650 Ti Boost and GTX 660 well separated.
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Hrel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
More realistically, price the GTX660 at MOST 180. I can find 7850's for 160, from XFX no less.Anandtech, please add an "edit" function to you comments. Also, I want an email when someone responds to me. Then to be able to click a link that takes me directly to that comment, instead of having to plow through 100's of comments.
CiccioB - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
nvidia prices its solutions at the price it think they are best. If GTX660 sells like cookies, why on earth should they lower the price? To have a red quarter like AMD?And possibly they have quite a few GK106 with just some shaders dead but the memory controller completely working. So those pieces would have to be sold at GTX650 Ti price. With this move they can sell them with a bit of premium price.
Consider that for nvidia this new board costed zero, while AMD had to forge a new chip, which has a cost.
Hrel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
It'd be nice to Just Cause 2 in your benchmarks. It has a built in benchmark and everything. Awesome game people will be playing for years, considering they added multi-player. I know you're still working on the benchmark suite, so this is a suggestion I'd really like to see.Hrel - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
nice to see*Holy Batman do you guys need to add an edit function to your comments.
aTonyAtlaw - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
I would posit that perhaps you need to proofread your comments more than Anandtech needs to provide an edit function.skiboysteve - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
its good to keep in mind that open air coolers can be very loud if you dont have a well ventilated case like me. I have a 6850 with an open air cooler and the thing is VERY loud because it gets so crazy hot inside my case. If I had a blower on it, it wouldn't be nearly as loudmarc1000 - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
where is Starcraft II ? it's no longer part of the test suite?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
Yes, it was removed. It gets rather silly on high-end cards these days, which is what we base our benchmark selections on.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
How about Skyrim with the high resolution textures? I've heard that that requires 2 GB to run decently. That would be nice to see tested when the silly 1 GB card is released.warezme - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 - link
I think it would be interesting to also post mobile GPU numbers along with these cards. In this field of models there is some relevance related to how the two types would perform in similar games as a comparison.