GTX 660Ti Reviews

[hokies83]

Hmph Seems to overclock like crap and be 15-20% slower then a 670...
Gigabite Windforce Gtx 670 for 399$ still seems to be the best Bang for your buck performance... Atleast in the Nvidia Camp.

Seems 250$ would be a better price point for this card..

Only Card that Shows any Promise and that would be at the 300$ price mark would be That Galaxy Kaf 660ti with the 3gb Vram.

 

[blackened23]

Soo...

Tom's Hardware says the card is a disappointment that's only competitive with the Radeon 7870.

AnandTech, Guru 3D, TechPowerUp have it on par or better than a 7950 and are giving it Editor's Choice awards.

MSI 660 Ti (overclocked) Twin Frozr is $300 after rebate and comes with Borderlands 2

MSI 7950 Twin Frozr is $330 after rebate, with no games.

After all the driver headaches, lack of PhysX, and OpenGL (RAGE) problems I had with my 5870, it's a no brainer, I bought the 660 Ti. Looks like the perfect card for me to play at 1080p with low AA settings (I usually just use injectSMAA).

This is EXACTLY what i'm saying. Performance is ALL OVER the place, suffice it to say that this card chokes with high AA settings or high tessellation settings, at times performing worse than the 7870. Its great with no AA though.

I think the GTX 670 / 7970 are MUCH BETTER buys. Most people want to use AA and tessellation in their games, and the 660ti isn't a consistent performer with higher visual quality settings.

 

[blackened23]

While certainly it is memory bandwidth constrained, do you think midrange < $300 buyers are typically using 8xAA? Theres a point of diminishing returns for the performance hit even on the Radeons.

I think most people are using anti aliasing on their PCs , yes. Unless they're using a 100$ budget card or HD3000/4000. This is why the 670/680/7970 are superior to the 660ti, IMO unless you're really hurting for cash.

 

[exar333]

There have been 7970s dipping to ~$350 lately as well, if you can snag a hot deal. How do you beat that?

I still say the 660Ti and 7950 are pretty much a draw if you don't plan to OC. The 7950 is MUCH better if you do plan to OC. Bundling BL2 with all Kepler cards is a great move by NV to push more of these units. Its not the usual 'throw away' title you get free with a new card.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

to keep things interesting, the Borderlands 2 bundle seems to be extending over to the other GK104 parts...so if the 660Ti is too cut-down for your liking, the 670 suddenly becomes a tastier option, especially one with a $30 off coupon: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814130782

unfortunately just the reference design, but hey, $369 for a reference 670 + Borderlands 2 isn't too shabby

 

[RussianSensation]

parkerlewis,

MSI TF is not $330 after rebate but $317 and yes it comes with 3 free games. Not as good as Borderlands though but both the price you are quoting and lack of games is not exactly accurate.

unfortunately just the reference design, but hey, $369 for a reference 670 + Borderlands 2 isn't too shabby

That's a great game choice on NV's part. Maybe they can retroactively give away BL2 coupon codes to previous GTX670 buyers?

 

[n0x1ous]

I think most people are using anti aliasing on their PCs , yes. Unless they're using a 100$ budget card or HD3000/4000. This is why the 670/680/7970 are superior to the 660ti, IMO unless you're really hurting for cash.

I agree that most are using AA on their PC's blackened23, I just dont think this buyer segment is using 8xAA - more likely 4x or a deferred FXAA/MLAA/AAA

If I was in the market the 192 bit bus would be insufficient for me. Hell, my 480's have 177GB/s memory bandwidth -already more than these when the memory controller would be fully utilized.

If the 660 couldnt handle any MSAA and only shader based methods that would make this a major letdown, but as long as it performs ok at 4XAA/2XAA + FXAA @ 1080p then they have hit their target.

 

[Mistwalker]

There have been 7970s dipping to ~$350 lately as well, if you can snag a hot deal. How do you beat that?

I still say the 660Ti and 7950 are pretty much a draw if you don't plan to OC. The 7950 is MUCH better if you do plan to OC. Bundling BL2 with all Kepler cards is a great move by NV to push more of these units. Its not the usual 'throw away' title you get free with a new card.

I typed up a reply that said basically this, and got beaten...but yeah, THIS. Borderlands 2 is a nice pack-in for sure.

The 660Ti is a decent performing card--better than I expected, particularly with the reduced ROPs--but the 7900 series is still the best value out there in the high-end. It loses a lot if you don't OC at all, but even then a 7970 at $350? That's really damn good.

At $249 the 660Ti would have immediately become the best value card currently available period, but unfortunately these cards are going to sell at $300+ anyway. At least we might see 7870 price drops...

 

[bunnyfubbles]

parkerlewis,

MSI TF is not $330 after rebate but $317 and yes it comes with 3 free games. Not as good as Borderlands though but both the price you are quoting and lack of games is not exactly accurate.



That's a great game choice on NV's part. Maybe they can retroactively give away BL2 coupon codes to previous GTX670 buyers?

why not 680 buyers as well?

from the looks of things, its a physical card with activation codes on them that get handed out with the hardware at the point of sale to promote new sales, so I doubt nVidia would give them away retroactively. Newegg might be willing to do something if you just recently purchased a 670 or 680 (say past week or so), but I doubt any of us day 1 adopters of the 680 would be in luck

the way I see it this is basically a partnership between nVidia and Gearbox/2KGames to help promote both of their products (as BL2 is still a month from release), and I wouldn't be surprised if we see a ~$50 price cut across the GK104 range not long after Borderlands 2 releases.

 

[SirPauly]

Maybe they can retroactively give away BL2 coupon codes to previous GTX670 buyers?

That would be welcomed!

 

[RussianSensation]

That would be welcomed!

EVGA did. I got Mafia 2 coupons for free for my 470s even though it wasn't part of the initial bundle. Maybe EVGA will come through.

If the 660 couldnt handle any MSAA and only shader based methods that would make this a major letdown, but as long as it performs ok at 4XAA/2XAA + FXAA @ 1080p then they have hit their target.

You probably don't want to see Tom's review then. Compared the 670, the MSAA weakness is exposed, even at 4xMSAA it was still a struggle at times. Xbitlabs revealed same weaknesses and so did Computerbase. Problem is this card can't even use 2GB of VRAM either. So it's crippled everywhere. When next gen games come out, the 7950 will have that extra overclocking headroom, 3GB of VRAM and MSAA headroom and GTX660Ti will have nothing left. BL2 is the only thing that keeps this alive at $300. Should probably be a $250-275 card without the new game.

 

[toyota]

EVGA did. I got Mafia 2 coupons for free for my 470s even though it wasn't part of the initial bundle. Maybe EVGA will come through.

luckily that worked out for me too...

 

[JM Popaleetus]

Sure it'll be fast but compared to 2x HD7950 CF it'll be destroyed at this rez.

Let's see a review with 15 games and pushing the cards to the limit with mods and high AA, not FXAA and High settings on Shogun 2 to preserve GTX570's performance with its 1.28GB of VRAM.

What happens is eye-popping: GTX660Ti SLI is only 6% faster than a 1050mhz HD7970 at 2560x1600! That really shows this card is good for 1080P but not much more. 2 of these in SLI won't even beat a 1.2ghz HD7970 and compared to 2x HD7950 OCed they'll be crushed by 40% easily at 2560x1440.

Think about it, at 2560x1600 this card is already 7% slower than an 800mhz 7950. Put up 2x HD7950 @ 1.1ghz and it'll mop the floor with 2x overclocked GTX660Ti SLI at high rez.

That's the biggest surprise for me. How anyone in the world would pick $600 660Ti SLI over HD7950 CF. Even a factory preoverclocked 660Ti can't touch an 800mhz 7950 at high resolution. Oced GTX660Ti SLI for high rez is going to be far behind 1.1ghz+ 7950 CF.

http://tpucdn.com/reviews/Palit/GeForce_GTX_660_Ti_Jet_Stream/images/perfrel_2560.gif[IMG][/QUOTE]It won't be far behind when nVidia has properly scaling drivers out and AMD's drivers cause multi-GPU to be worse.

See Skyim, it was bull. The reason I, and others don't care about comparing this card to AMD is because we're sick of AMD's drivers for Xfire. They work great for single card solutions however. But that's not what I am looking to do.

I'm sorry you're "surprised" by that.

 

[Silverforce11]

Benchmarks aside, does anyone here actually perceive a difference in visual fidelity between 4x and 8x in FPSs @ high resolutions?

I notice but not a huge improvement as no AA to 4x MSAA. I tend to leave it at 4x MSAA in my games when there's the option to use it.

 

[blackened23]

It won't be far behind when nVidia has properly scaling drivers out and AMD's drivers cause multi-GPU to be worse.

See Skyim, it was bull. The reason I, and others don't care about comparing this card to AMD is because we're sick of AMD's drivers for Xfire. They work great for single card solutions however. But that's not what I am looking to do.

I'm sorry you're "surprised" by that.

Eh? Have you been using nvidia for a while? Nvidia has some games that are still flat out broken in sli. While skyrim on crossfire was bad there are some puzzling sli situations on green side as well. The Secret World is still screwed up with SLI, despite being a TWIMTBP title. Alan Wake took 4 months for SLI drivers, AMD had them day one. I get graphical corruption in DOTA 2 with SLI enabled.

I dunno, i'm not saying the skyrim situation is cool but I didn't have any horrible situations when I ran Cf7970. I don't think CF is bad in terms of crossfire support, although AMD should pick up the pace of adding new features to their drivers (the current catalyst interface is aging)

 

[Haserath]

Asymmetrical memory interface ftl...

 

[n0x1ous]

EVGA did. I got Mafia 2 coupons for free for my 470s even though it wasn't part of the initial bundle. Maybe EVGA will come through.




You probably don't want to see Tom's review then. Compared the 670, the MSAA weakness is exposed, even at 4xMSAA it was still a struggle at times. Xbitlabs revealed same weaknesses and so did Computerbase. Problem is this card can't even use 2GB of VRAM either. So it's crippled everywhere. When next gen games come out, the 7950 will have that extra overclocking headroom, 3GB of VRAM and MSAA headroom and GTX660Ti will have nothing left. BL2 is the only thing that keeps this alive at $300. Should probably be a $250-275 card without the new game.

The only one in that link to be concerned in is Max Payne 3 @ 4X. the rest were 8X and Metro @ 4X but we already knew Kepler was not great at Metro 2033 in general.

I do agree its still a bit overpriced @ $300 but BL2 softens that blow. $249-$269 with BL2 would be spot on. I still think its generally acceptable @ 4X MSAA and lower.

I also agree that 7950 is the better value and long term prospect especially at its current prices, but I would take the 660 over the 7870.

 

[RussianSensation]

It won't be far behind when nVidia has properly scaling drivers out and AMD's drivers cause multi-GPU to be worse.
I'm sorry you're "surprised" by that.

You can't use drives to add more ROPs, fix memory bandwidth issues, and enable 2GB on the 660Ti. You don't think any one of those 3 things will become an issue in future games? The funny part is it was only 6% faster than a 1050mhz 7970, but GE 7970s scale to 1.15-1.2ghz. If you want to spend $600 on 2 cards that will be only as fast as a 1.2ghz single-card, go right ahead. No one here is stopping you.

660Ti is based on GK104 for which NV already optimizes SLI scaling. Scaling is not the problem here but Kepler's deficiency at high resolutions. You can even compare HD7970 GE CF vs. 690 and you'll see this. 690 trails by 19% at 2560x1440 4AA:

Plus, you aren't taking into account that GTX660Ti is a 1.5GB card so it will perform much worse than a GTX670 SLI. $600 on 1.5GB SLI setup? So if a game uses > 1.5GB of VRAM at 2560x1440 4AA, what then?

 

[thilanliyan]

So is this card effectively 128-bit most of the time and then 192-bit some of the time? Or is it always 192-bit?

 

[RussianSensation]

So is this card effectively 128-bit most of the time and then 192-bit some of the time? Or is it always 192-bit?

Per AT's review, supposedly as long as the game doesn't use more than 1.5GB of VRAM, it has full 192-bit enabled. Once 1.5GB is exceeded, bandwidth drops to 64-bit only, or 48GB/sec. That's why it's shocking to me people are considering this for SLI for 2560x1440.

 

[thilanliyan]

Per AT's review, supposedly as long as the game doesn't use more than 1.5GB of VRAM, it has full 192-bit enabled. Once 1.5GB is exceeded, bandwidth drops to 64-bit only, or 48GB/sec.

That....is weird lol

I don't think I have ever heard of anything like that with any other card before. Why not just make it a 1.5gb card then if it becomes slower when using 2gb (as I understand it)?

There would be no point to run this card with a 2560x1XXX monitor then, but for 1080p gaming it should be okay I suppose.

 

[notty22]

As long as the game doesn't use more than 1.5GB of VRAM, it has full 192-bit enabled. Once 1.5GB is exceeded, bandwidth drops to 64-bit only, or 48GB/sec.

That's not what Ryan wrote. Also find me a reviewer that says that statement, that it's a 1.5gb card.
He mentions a downside, but they don't quite understand how Nvidia pulls this off, so they can't define it. Beyond it's not as ideal as having 1.5gb or 3gb on a 192bit bus.
edit:
Ideal might not be the best word, but it's a unorthodox arrangement, one that is happening from a new implementation.

Of course at a low-level it&#8217;s more complex than that. In a symmetrical design with an equal amount of RAM on each controller it&#8217;s rather easy to interleave memory operations across all of the controllers, which maximizes performance of the memory subsystem as a whole. However complete interleaving requires that kind of a symmetrical design, which means it&#8217;s not quite suitable for use on NVIDIA&#8217;s asymmetrical memory designs. Instead NVIDIA must start playing tricks. And when tricks are involved, there&#8217;s always a downside.
The best case scenario is always going to be that the entire 192bit bus is in use by interleaving a memory operation across all 3 controllers, giving the card 144GB/sec of memory bandwidth (192bit * 6GHz / 8). But that can only be done at up to 1.5GB of memory; the final 512MB of memory is attached to a single memory controller. This invokes the worst case scenario, where only 1 64-bit memory controller is in use and thereby reducing memory bandwidth to a much more modest 48GB/sec.
How NVIDIA spreads out memory accesses will have a great deal of impact on when we hit these scenarios. In the past we&#8217;ve tried to divine how NVIDIA is accomplishing this, but even with the compute capability of CUDA memory appears to be too far abstracted for us to test any specific theories. And because NVIDIA is continuing to label the internal details of their memory bus a competitive advantage, they&#8217;re unwilling to share the details of its operation with us. Thus we&#8217;re largely dealing with a black box here, one where poking and prodding doesn&#8217;t produce much in the way of meaningful results.
As with the GTX 550 Ti, all we can really say at this time is that the performance we get in our benchmarks is the performance we get. Our best guess remains that NVIDIA is interleaving the lower 1.5GB of address while pushing the last 512MB of address space into the larger memory bank, but we don&#8217;t have any hard data to back it up. For most users this shouldn&#8217;t be a problem (especially since GK104 is so wishy-washy at compute), but it remains that there&#8217;s always a downside to an asymmetrical memory design. With any luck one day we&#8217;ll find that downside and be able to better understand the GTX 660 Ti&#8217;s performance in the process.

 

[zaydq]

Severely unimpressed with this card's results. May i also mention that just cuz its with BL2 doesnt mean it'll go down in price when the deal is done. Its literally a promotion, it'll sell copies of the game and then sell units to get great numbers on launch, then the promo will go away and price will stay the same.

The GTX660Ti is a $250 card at most, nvidia doesn't pay $60 for BL2 to bundle em with their cards, they pay $15-$20 at most considering its free advertising for the game, and it gets copies out and it sells units. Its a mutual win win.

I'll just put it simple. Im not preaching the 7950, im not hating the 660ti, but i am preaching that the 660ti is being boasted to be alot more than it is, and it shows. It is on par with stock ref 7950s, put it up against a 7950 ghz ed(aka just an ocd 7950) and it gets wiped out. It's overclocking abilities are ultimately not that great, and still falls short to a 7950 @ 1ghz core clocks, which by the way, 1ghz core clocks are gotten on stock voltages. Its an alright card, but it doesn't compete with a 7950, it definitely belongs in the heat with the 7870/7850.

Anyone find an oc'd 7850 vs an oc'd 660ti comparison?

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Asymmetrical memory interface ftl...

its better than having less memory if its actually needed

with their solution you should basically have 1.5GB of memory at 192bit so as long as the game is within that range there shouldn't be any major performance penalty. And if it does go over that 1.5 mark into the 2GB range, the performance penalty would be less than if you didn't have that extra buffer...

 

[Attic]

Anyone considering this card really needs to look at it's future given the mem subsytem. I have the impression that only through some careful "review guidelines" has this card been able to beshown in the best possible light. Given the memory constraint put into the 660Ti, I doubt Current gamers coming from 460GTX and 560Ti are gonna be served the longetivty that might be expected by the 660Ti.

The 660Ti might be a serious turd on future games when that 2gb's is actually fully needed and memory constraints are brought into play (something Ultra settings with high AA on current games can hint at for the future of games at standard settings).

Looks solid for gaming from reading reviews, but remember so did the nVidia 8600GTS at it's time (and that was a pretty serious turd of a card for gaming).

Hoping for followup reviews to test a wider area of this cards performance, and against it's true competior a non reference 900-950mhz 7950.