tweaktown review GTX660Ti

[RussianSensation]

About NV "better support".
Just look at look at the 3 games TT tested - Mafia II, Just Cause 2 and Metro 2033. AMD can't even render them with same effects like Nvidia.

I am curious to know what PhysX effects are in Metro 2033 since I haven't heard anyone speak about them? Could it be that no NV card can play Metro 2033 with PhysX on at acceptable framerates OR that those PhysX effects are not worth talking about?

Mafia II PhysX? When Mafia II was released, GTX470 + GTX460 couldn't even break 40 fps with 2AA and PhysX at 1080P. You know how expensive such a setup cost back then? GTX480 + GTX460 couldn't even get 50 fps. That was probably $600-700 worth of GPUs to enable this one feature that added swinging coat on the character and a bunch of debris.

Interesting that without PhysX, HD5870 for $370 delivered just 2 fps slower performance than the $500 GTX480. Oops....$130 extra dollars to pay for a swinging coat and debris in 1 game....no thanks. All those other cards slower than the GTX470 were unplayable with PhysX on.

Speaking of NV's "better support" how are those TRD driver errors working out? How is the performance in Dirt Showdown with Compute and Sniper Elite V2? Both sides have pros and cons. Painting NV's driver team as some Olympic Gold medallist team of the GPU world that doesn't have issues of its own is not exactly correct:

There's how many 460 models now? I think you need to educate yourself on how Steam classifies video cards.

Also, the 570 launched a week before the 6970 and 6950. When you condense the sample size into one month, one week is a long time.

I generally recommended GTX460 over the 6850 simply because of its incredible overclocking headroom. However, those who think GTX570 was the better card than HD6950 2GB (Unlocked) or HD6970 using Steam are only proving the point that NV can charge more for a card that's not really any better. Some GTX570s blew up due to poor VRM design with overclocking, and now they are running out of VRAM as well. So was it worth it to pay $350 back in the day for the GTX570 against a $280 HD6950 2GB with an unlock to a 6970?

When the dust settled, unlocked HD6950 2GB doesn't run into VRAM bottleneck but those 1.28GB GTX570 do in many modern games where the extra performance is needed. Unlocked HD6950 was going for $250-280 while GTX570 sold for $340-350 for most of that time. If people want to pay more $ for an NV card with less VRAM, that's their decision but not in any way reflective of the performance delta between an HD6950 @ 6970 unlock and the GTX570 today. Looking at recent performance, GTX570 isn't any faster than HD6970 either.

Ryan even noted in his GPU reviews that he can't test Shogun 2 at Ultra Quality because NV cards with less than 1.5GB of VRAM won't even run that bench. We have been asking him to test GPU Shogun 2 with Ultra + 4xMSAA in Shogun 2 in his review but he said it would be unfair to NV (i.e., It would hammer the GTX560Ti 1GB and GTX570 too much).

 

[moonbogg]

OK so GK104 finally takes its intended market slot. Thats nice.

 

[SirPauly]

Actually never really recommended a GPU to anyone -- can only speak for my subjective tastes, tolerances and first hand experiences.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I am curious to know what PhysX effects are in Metro 2033 since I haven't heard anyone speak about them? Could it be that no NV card can play Metro 2033 with PhysX on at acceptable framerates OR that those PhysX effects are not worth talking about?

The physics load in Mafia II isn't very high.

When I was running two 470s with a single 9800 GT doing PhysX I'd see around 13-19% usage on my 9800GT and framerates wouldn't suffer much at all.

In Mafia II there is a ton of workload, I'd see 60-70% usage on my 9800GT and a crazy bottleneck from it, causing usage to drop below 30% on my two 470s.

Same can be said in Batman AC, the PhysX load can become so high that it stalls out of performance of my rendering 470s into the sub 30% usage area.

Metro 2033's PhysX is very limited, and it's "advanced" doesn't change a whole lot. There is actual PhsyX load taking place without checking that box, it occurs as cpu load however I believe.

 

[BlockheadBrown]

The threads I've been watching has me leaning more and more towards a 7950, but having to wait until mid-August (for potential price drops) is going to be a pain. The potential $50ish in savings would help make up for the price difference I see when my two 560s sell off (different rigs - not in SLi).

 

[SirPauly]

RussianSensation,

Did you ever play Mafia 2 with PhysX?

 

[blackened23]

Honestly, I don't notice any difference at all with physx in Metro 2033 other than a sharp framerate drop. That has to be the worst physx implementation of all time, since it lowers performance without a perceivable image quality difference. Other games like Batman: AC have a performance drop for physx but have a perceivable difference for sure, so its worth it if you have SLI.

If anyone knows anything otherwise, please post it but i've always turned that and ADOF off (can't notice any difference except a performance drop with either option)

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Metro 2033 PhysX isn't demanding nor performance leaking from my personal experience with it.

Mafia II by comparison suffered far more than Metro 2033.

 

[SirPauly]

With Mafia 2, with a single GPU, the cloth physics was done by the CPU. With a discrete PhysX card, the cloth physics was done by the GPU, from my understanding. Zogrim has a nice site that offers nice examples of what the effects are in the titles:

http://physxinfo.com/data/vreview_maf2.php


http://physxinfo.com/data/vreview_metro.php

 

[RussianSensation]

RussianSensation,

Did you ever play Mafia 2 with PhysX?

Yup, when I had the EVGA 470. Got 3 copies of the game for free with 3 of those 470s. The PhysX was alright but that's just 1 game out of 100s of games on the market. Also, since then NV put no effort into PhysX in games at all. I can't recall any game in the last 2 years besides Batman series that makes me want to go out and buy an NV card for that one feature. When PhysX was being marketed, I really wanted it to take off and fundamentally change the way games are. Instead, all we got was a little bit of extra debris in Mafia 2. Disappointing overall. That isn't even as good as BF3's debris/destruction physics. :\

Whatever PhysX does now is really not anything that can't be done with good CPU physics engine. PhysX in its current form just isn't living up to expectations and it's getting way way worse with time since in the last 2 years almost no games have used it.

Here is CPU physics that looks just as good as modern PhysX:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFLXttdV8Vg

This 2 min video has more realistic physics than anything NV made in the history of PhysX. When NV makes PhysX look like this, I'll buy an NV card for real PhysX effects.

 

[blackened23]

Metro 2033 PhysX isn't demanding nor performance leaking from my personal experience with it.

Hmm, interesting, maybe it has something to do with scene selection for the ingame metro 2033 benchmark. I just always turned it off because I thought the first two areas were markedly slower with it enabled (this is dating back to when I first played through it on a GTX 580), I could be incorrect and crazy though.....Shrug. Been a while since I played through it.

Its still definitely the worst physx implementation ever

 

[VisceralM]

Some overclocking results. Nothing real world, but something.

http://wccftech.com/geforce-gtx-660ti-benchmarks-leaked-overclocked-performance-exposed/

 

[SirPauly]

Yup, when I had the EVGA 470. Got 3 copies of the game for free with 3 of those 470s. The PhysX was alright but that's just 1 game out of 100s of games on the market. Also, since then NV put no effort into PhysX in games at all. I can't recall any game in the last 2 years besides Batman series that makes me want to go out and buy an NV card for that one feature. When PhysX was being marketed, I really wanted it to take off and fundamentally change the way games are. Instead, all we got was a little bit of extra debris in Mafia 2. Disappointing overall. :\

Personally never looked at GPU PhysX to fundamentally change the ways games are -- more-so to raise the bar of fidelity, realism, immersion and improve upon the gaming experience. Also a way to bring some value to last generation cards that I used as paper weights or collect dust on a shelf. Underwhelmed by the amount of titles -- was hoping for 6-12 AAA titles but obviously much less. Was always curious why and Zogrim had a nice interview with nVidia here and an awesome question:

PhysXInfo.com: Over last years, amount of GPU PhysX games is actually decreasing. There were five games in 2009, three in 2010 and so far only one in 2011. How can you explain that?

Enjoyed the way it was posed.


http://physxinfo.com/news/7165/gett...nto-games-interview-with-nvidia-content-team/

I think GPU Physics as a whole can fundamentally change gaming but this is going to take the entire industry to do so -- coming together eventually.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

I think GPU Physics as a whole can fundamentally change gaming but this is going to take the entire industry to do so -- coming together eventually.

That's what I thought six years ago. Six years ago. Six years.

Arkham City is the only game I've played where PhysX makes a real difference. However I do want to punch the guy in the face who decided to use so many damn effects during the Joker boss battle. Every other part of the game was smooth and playable, but when the Joker boss battle comes up framerate literally dropped in half. And it doesn't make any sense to do so much there because it's a boss battle and you're going to be focused on fighting the dozens of enemies, and not looking at the environment.

 

[Red Hawk]

Ryan even noted in his GPU reviews that he can't test Shogun 2 at Ultra Quality because NV cards with less than 1.5GB of VRAM won't even run that bench. We have been asking him to test GPU Shogun 2 with Ultra + 4xMSAA in Shogun 2 in his review but he said it would be unfair to NV (i.e., It would hammer the GTX560Ti 1GB and GTX570 too much).

Actually, it's possible to go into Shogun 2's configuration files and override its memory size detection to whatever value you want. I did that to trick Shogun 2 into thinking my 5770 had 2 GB of RAM instead of 1. :sneaky: If you do that, you can benchmark the game at full spec. Performance will tank if you have only 1 GB of RAM, but you can run the benchmark.

 

[Grooveriding]

Mafia 2's physx was the most irritating use of that 'feature' I have seen. Incredibly over done debris particles everywhere. To the point of being nonsensical and completely unrealistic. Shoot a bullet at a concrete object and apparently hundreds of oddly shaped little objects fly across the screen and strew across the floor..

My opinion on physx is pretty well known on this board though Worthless feature that is unreasonably demanding and there are better physics implementations seen in games done entirely on the CPU with no noticeable performance impact. See : Battlefield 3.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

It's a feature that is nice to have, if the option is there and I have the hardware for it I always enable it.

However it's about as far down on the "factors of purchase" list you can probably get. It really needs to go open source, or there needs to be a major breakthrough in gpu performance where low end sub $150 "mainstream" cards can handle it.

I just don't see that happening though, games just aren't that demanding, DX11 doesn't work on consoles, and there really is no reason for mainstream people to upgrade if they have a 8800 or faster.

 

[boxleitnerb]

Mafia 2's physx was the most irritating use of that 'feature' I have seen. Incredibly over done debris particles everywhere. To the point of being nonsensical and completely unrealistic. Shoot a bullet at a concrete object and apparently hundreds of oddly shaped little objects fly across the screen and strew across the floor..

My opinion on physx is pretty well known on this board though Worthless feature that is unreasonably demanding and there are better physics implementations seen in games done entirely on the CPU with no noticeable performance impact. See : Battlefield 3.

Compare the number of particles -it's not even close.

PhysX cannot be blamed for unrealistic effects. It is a tool, nothing more. Ask the devs to make a better job. Unless Nvidia employees themselves program the PhysX effects in games. Do they?

 

[Silverforce11]

However it's about as far down on the "factors of purchase" list you can probably get. It really needs to go open source

For once we can agree on something common sense.

All graphics APIs need to be open source, not closed and restricting its widespread usage. Thus, DirectCompute and OpenCL.

NV needs to stop wasting resources on Physx and actually work on their products having a tangible advantage in dx11 compared to their competition. i.e Their advantage in Tessellation was a huge bonus.

 

[RussianSensation]

Red Faction Guerilla has a great destruction model. Here is a quick look at some of the games that try to use realistic physics effects. Mafia II effects are not very good at all with excessive debris.

Game Technology: Best Destruction On Games, top 10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=377h3l6K3hk&feature=related

P.S. After we have exhausted HD7950's 3GB of VRAM, 32 ROPs, 384-bit bus, 30-40% overclocking, addressed that NV and AMD both have driver problems on both sides, the discussion has finally narrowed itself down to PhysX. It's been a while since we found ourselves revisiting this "killer" NV feature. Good times.

 

[Grooveriding]

Compare the number of particles -it's not even close.

PhysX cannot be blamed for unrealistic effects. It is a tool, nothing more. Ask the devs to make a better job. Unless Nvidia employees themselves program the PhysX effects in games. Do they?

Ultimately it is nvidia's feature and toolset. They are responsible for the technology, its hardware demands and optimization(lack of it).

GPU physics most certainly has potential to go somewhere. But currently the only example, nvidia's physx, is an alpha technology to be generous. It cannot deliver a game-changing experience as yet in an actual game over what the CPU already does, beyond tech demos. What makes that even worse is that along with offering nothing substantial over the CPU option currently, it hammers your frame rate, making it a negative of sorts.

As Balla said it if/when a gpu physics implementation ever does take off it will need to be open source/hardware agnostic for game developers to widely take it seriously. It will also need to be capable of doing what it's hyped up to do currently, but fails to deliver. And do all that without cutting your framerate in half.

Right now it's just a cool idea, but the usage of it in games proves it's in its infancy and not capable of doing enough to make it relevant. The fact that it is a five year old technology and there are less than 20 games that use it really speaks to its current ineffectual nature.

 

[Red Hawk]

I'm pretty sure Nvidia works closely with any developers who use hardware PhysX. That is the point of the TWIMTBP program, after all.

 

[Silverforce11]

P.S. After we have exhausted HD7950's 3GB of VRAM, 32 ROPs, 384-bit bus, 30-40% overclocking, addressed that NV and AMD both have driver problems on both sides, the discussion has finally narrowed itself down to PhysX. It's been a while since we found ourselves revisiting this "killer" NV feature. Good times.

CUDA will be the last killer feature touted.

 

[f1sherman]

Speaking of NV's "better support" how are those TRD driver errors working out?

Ehh...I think you got carried away a bit.

• It'd TDR
• TDR is not a bug, or driver error, although it can be caused by a bad driver.
• Similarly to BSOD, list of TDR causes is quite large. It can be caused virtually by any software/hardware malfunction/instability. TDR is not intrinisic to Nvidia, or to any particular piece of hardware.
• See?
• Your "TRD" link is not working

How is the performance in Dirt Showdown with Compute and Sniper Elite V2? Both sides have pros and cons. Painting NV's driver team as some Olympic Gold medallist team of the GPU world that doesn't have issues of its own is not exactly correct:

I didn't even mention drivers. Not even once. Let alone gave NV driver team Gold medal.

You went sledgehammering PhysX, and for what?
Because I am not aware of anyone here that is satisfied with current PhysX implementation/presence.
But you know what? Same like driver AO, it's there.
And it's up to a user whether he will use it or not.

Regarding 570 vs HD69** you concluded that NV can charge more for a card that's not really any better.

Well duh... It was I who said FPS/$ --> AMD in the first place
Remember? 460 being the only disruptively priced GPU?
/sigh

Because of all this, I am now going to watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

 

[boxleitnerb]

Ultimately it is nvidia's feature and toolset. They are responsible for the technology, its hardware demands and optimization(lack of it).

GPU physics most certainly has potential to go somewhere. But currently the only example, nvidia's physx, is an alpha technology to be generous. It cannot deliver a game-changing experience as yet in an actual game over what the CPU already does, beyond tech demos. What makes that even worse is that along with offering nothing substantial over the CPU option currently, it hammers your frame rate, making it a negative of sorts.

As Balla said it if/when a gpu physics implementation ever does take off it will need to be open source/hardware agnostic for game developers to widely take it seriously. It will also need to be capable of doing what it's hyped up to do currently, but fails to deliver. And do all that without cutting your framerate in half.

Right now it's just a cool idea, but the usage of it in games proves it's in its infancy and not capable of doing enough to make it relevant. The fact that it is a five year old technology and there are less than 20 games that use it really speaks to its current ineffectual nature.

While I agree with much of what you're saying, I don't think Nvidia is responsible for the artistic realization of PhysX in a game. This is what I was saying, nothing more.