That's because a stock 7950/7970 aren't that fast in BF3 since AMD cards suffer in deferred MSAA Forstbite 2.0 engine. BF3 is also one of the best games for nV for that reason. Doesn't matter though since 7950 and 7970 overclock 25-50%. So they easily catch up to NV's cards while beating them almost everywhere else.
You can overclock 7900 series to still get close to 670/680 in the games where 670/680 are faster, but you cannot really overclock 670/680 to catch up to 7900 series in games where AMD is leading because that lead is usually massive (Crysis 1/Warhead, Metro 2033, Anno 2070, Alan Wake, Sniper Elite V2, Sleeping Dogs, Dirt Showdown, Serious Sam 3, Bulletstorm, SKYRIM with mods / 8AA, Batman AC 8AA, etc.). Basically while NV cards are good at the popular games such as WOW, Guild Wars 2 and BF3/Crysis 2, but on the whole they have some serious gaps in many other less mainstream games.
Unless you play BF3/GW2/WOW/BatmanAC/Lost Planet 2/Medal of Honor Warfighter and Crysis 2/3 only, then those gaps will show up eventually.
If all you play is BF3, then sure $300 GTX660Ti is good.
You keep saying this over and over. So the fact that your card performs like a dog in Dirt Showdown, Sniper Elite V2 and Sleeping Dogs is great? Jeez.
Maybe you can send me a GTX680 when Medal of Honor Warfighter launches so I can actually play the game....
Either way this game of throwing $ at developers by one upping each other is just hurting us. I don't feel like having an AMD and an NV card in my rig to play certain games. There is no reason that someone like Grooveriding with $1k of GPUs should be running a game at 40-45 fps. Stuff like this hurts PC gaming. At the end a person may buy a $400 NV GPU, fire up one of these AMD sponsored titles and then realize it runs poorly and abandon PC gaming for PS4. That's what will happen if $400 GPUs can't even run a basic game at 60 fps. This is no different than someone who buys a 7970 and fires up The Secret World and it has the
most artificial looking red bricks via Tessellation seen in the last 2 years and it runs like a dog.
91 fps in DX9 Ultra on 7970 and 96 fps on a 680
vs.
24 fps in DX11 Ultra on 7970 and 53 fps on a 680
Almost a 4x reduction in performance on AMD cards and the game doesn't look any better.....that's great for PC gaming? Ya, I guess if you bought a 680.
Not many PC gamers have $1k to buy a $500 AMD card and a $500 NV card to get the best of all world.