NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost Review: Bringing Balance To The Force
by Ryan Smith on March 26, 2013 8:00 AM ESTCrysis: Warhead
Up next is our legacy title for 2013, Crysis: Warhead. The stand-alone expansion to 2007’s Crysis, at over 4 years old Crysis: Warhead can still beat most systems down. Crysis was intended to be future-looking as far as performance and visual quality goes, and it has clearly achieved that. We’ve only finally reached the point where single-GPU cards have come out that can hit 60fps at 1920 with 4xAA.
Crysis has shown to favor raw ROP performance and memory bandwidth above shader performance, so it’s been a rough game for NVIDIA’s Kepler cards, which typically have less memory bandwidth than their AMD competition. In this case at Gamer quality the GTX 650 Ti Boost still can’t crack 60fps, and it’s trailing the 7850 by 12%. On the other hand it has 50% more memory bandwidth than the 7790, so the 1GB variant may be interesting to see here if it can achieve similar results as the 2GB variant.
It’s interesting to note though that because this game depends so much on ROP performance and memory bandwidth that this is as close as we’ll see the GTX 650 Ti Boost get to the GTX 660. There’s less than 5% separating them at Gamer quality; these cards have plenty of shading/texturing performance, but not enough ROP performance to satisfy Crysis.
Jumping to our minimum framerates, we do see things open up a bit as shader bottlenecking does occur in a few places. The result is that the GTX 650 Ti Boost falls well behind the 7850 in minimums, and the full GK106 GTX 660 pulls ahead. Still, the difference between the GTX 650 Ti and its boost variant is nothing short of staggering; the boost card leads by 45% here, relying heavily on those ROP and memory bandwidth advantages.
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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.