GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review: Nvidia's Trickle-Down Keplernomics

Page 4 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Status
Not open for further replies.

technoholic

Distinguished
Feb 27, 2008
800
0
19,160
Sorry but what i see here is a fail from NV mainly due to wrong pricing. 300 bucks is just too high for this card and from the reviews i read here and there, this thing competes mostly with 7870 and 7870 is a cheaper card which also has much better computing performance. And 7950, which is a clearly better card, has a similar price point to this. We will probably see a good increase in AMD's sales :)
 

technoholic

Distinguished
Feb 27, 2008
800
0
19,160
i don't understand why Nvidia cut computing performance so much since the software developers lately began using these optimizations more often in productivity software and also in games and it seems GPU computing, seems, has a bright future. I mean last generation was relatively better in general. Also is it me or are mid generation cards getting higher selling prices every gen?
 

Ironslice

Honorable
May 1, 2012
648
0
11,060
Every review on the internet except Tomshardware's compares the 660 ti to a 7950 and says that it's 10-15% faster than the 7870. IDK what toms did but somehow they must have messed up their review.
 
[citation][nom]atikkur[/nom]still, the best balanced kepler card is 670. but kepler generation is a bit weird.. so ill pas this gen happily..[/citation]

THe GTS 650 is probably the most balanced Kepler card, granted it is yet to be released.

[citation][nom]technoholic[/nom]i don't understand why Nvidia cut computing performance so much since the software developers lately began using these optimizations more often in productivity software and also in games and it seems GPU computing, seems, has a bright future. I mean last generation was relatively better in general. Also is it me or are mid generation cards getting higher selling prices every gen?[/citation]

I disagree with your last sentence. Nvidia may have overpriced this card, but AMD's mid-ranged pricing is very spot-on right now after the initial price cuts from being first to market (even then, Pitcairn was never really priced too badly relative to their performance like Tahiti and Cape Verde-based cards were). The 7870 is only a little slower than the 7950 and is priced accordingly. The 7850 is about as fast as the Radeon 6970 (maybe faster with new drivers) and is priced far below the 6970 with some models well under $250. Another thing to consider is that this might arguably not be a mid-ranged card because it is still intended to compete with AMD's second highest card, the 7950, a high end card.

The 7770 performs now as well as or better than the 6850 and overclocks better than the 6870 (although memory bandwidth might come into play here and let the 6870 have some big wins like the 7970 does versus the 670). The 7750 beats the 6770 and at a lower price point with the added advantage of not needing a PCIe power connector. AMD's low end GCN also has much better CF scaling, compute performance, tessellation performance, and more than the VLIW5 cards that they replaced.

We can't expect cards to be cheap simply because we want to call them mid-ranged. The 660 TI performs around the 7870 and the 7950, cards that are around the previous single-GPU king, the 580, in performance. The 580 was a more than $400-$450 card before the Fermi price cuts two or three months ago. Would you really expect them to be half as expensive as that just because we don't want to call the 660 TI a high-end card?

Also, I'd bet a lot that the GTX 650 and GTX 660 will have lower prices, but similar performance to the GTX 660 TI simply by having the same memory bandwidth, although the GTX 650 might be more to the 660 TI as the 7870 is to the 7950 rather than how the 670 is to the 680 because it really does have a much slower GPU rather than a somewhat slower GPU. The rest of Nvidia's mid-ranged lineup will have much better prices and should be more in-line with what we expect from mid-ranged cards in price/performance compared to the high end models.
 
[citation][nom]refillable[/nom]What's Up with reviews on other websites?In Techpoweruphttp://tpucdn.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_ [...] l_1920.gifIt trade blows with a 7950, not a 7870?In Hardwarecanucks:http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/ [...] -TI-82.jpgIt also trade blows with 7950, not 7870?And many more...[/citation]



Like I said earlier, that is almost definitely caused by Tech PowerUp and Hardwarecanucks using a 4.5GHz six-core LGA 2011 i7 rather than a 4.2GHz six-core LGA 2011 i7 CPU. Also, with how even the 7870 has consistently higher minimum frame rates than the 660 TI, let alone the 7950, I don't think I'd care if its averages really did go higher. This is why minimum frame rates should be paid attention to instead of just averages. Even beyond that is looking at how variable frame rates are in small time frames (something that Kepler does not seem to have failed at) which allows even 30FPS to be smoother than a very stutter-prone 60FPS. Having the highly variable frame rates that the Kepler cards do, they can cause stutter to be more obvious than it should be if the CPU can't limit the maximum frame rate enough.

I have to admit that I'm surprised to see so many people complaining about the Tom's review being a few percent off from the other reviews and then not even trying to look into why it was different. The CPU specs are clearly stated in each review and we should know by now that the GTX 600 cards are all memory bandwidth bottle-necked, so a faster CPU can let the maximum frame rates climb up a bit with the few frames that don't tax the memory as hard as some others (possibly such as frames that use the same textures as the previous frame did) and thus bring up the average with them. Did any of you wonder about how the minimums were almost always lower than AMD's cards, yet the averages were still somehow higher in several tests that had lower minimums?
 
This launch certainly doesn't pack the "wow" factor that the GTX 680/670 brought when they launched. But what I see is a very competent mainstream card after a round or two of price wars.

Currently, reference 7870s are around $280CAD, with some dipping down to $250CAD. That's a very good price for a card that is around GTX 660Ti's performance. To entice potential buyers, I think the GTX 660Ti should be selling around the $270 mark as well.

Keep in mind though, pricing is not always the same across countries. North America tends to enjoy cheaper hardware overall, whereas in Europe and certain parts of Asia, prices are up to $100 higher for the same thing. So the price argument for the 7870 does not apply to everyone.
 

tomfreak

Distinguished
May 18, 2011
1,334
0
19,280
save ur trouble, Kepler alone like 680 is already starve for memory bandwidth, Now the 660ti are making it worst, the second u pull the serious AA and high resolution texture, the 660ti sometimes drops the performance down below 7870. Tomorrows game are definitely going to have heavier memory bandwidth usage, I am expecting to see 660TI get hammer by this. This card is for people who are going to play todays game without AA

IMO 7870 and 670 is a "more" balance card than 660ti. Top up some money get 670 or just get 7870.
 
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/geforce-gtx-660-ti.html Their results seem to agree with Tom's review, but they used the newly released Bios for the 7950. They did have a stock clocked 7950 in the charts too though, and also a highly overclocked 660ti. They also use very high settings for most of their games in their review, and they test many games. I would still pick up a 7950 over a 660ti for the right price personally. The MSI Twin Frozer 7950 has been hovering around $309-339 on most sites, and I also expect AMD to drop the price to $299 very soon just to put some pressure on Nvidia.

I really think anyone thinking about buying either the 660ti/7950 should wait a little bit to see what happens to prices.
 

kartu

Distinguished
Mar 3, 2009
959
0
18,980
[citation][nom]crisan_tiberiu[/nom]so, this is basically a card that costs 40$ less then a GTX 580, consumes 100W less power then a gtx 580 and its 8% better...hmm, intresting.[/citation]
And is way behind, cough, 7950. "Interesting..." eh?
 


Keep in mind that the 660 TI can have some pretty bad minimum frame rates. Any memory bandwidth intensive frames just knock it out compared to the 7950 and the 660 TI also has very poor overclocking performance. It's a decent card at stock, but this is Tom's. Many of the gamers here aren't your average gamer and many (perhaps most) of us overclock.

What would you prefer, a 7950 that can probably hit almost 1200MHz if you get a good model (some of which are almost as cheap as the 660 TI), a 50% overclock, with similarly great memory overclocking, or a 660 TI that can't even hit a 20% overclock in performance very well? The 7970 scales very well with those numbers too whereas the 660 TI can get some pretty high GPU frequency numbers, but the memory bandwidth hurts it so much that it scales much worse without a substantial memory overclock (which can only be pushed so far). I wonder how far the GPU frequency can be dropped before there is a significant drop in gaming performance.

Also, again, Tom's had a slower CPU configuration than the other reviews and that is almost definitely why the Nvidia cards did better relative to the AMD cards in the Tom's review. The Nvidia cards are so memory bandwidth bottle-necked that their exceptionally fast GPUs can hold out strong average performance whilst having poor minimums and very high maximums. If that maximum exceeds the CPU's performance, then the CPU limits it and the average goes down. Increase the CPU performance somewhat and the higher maximums drag the average upwards a little.
 

demonhorde665

Distinguished
Jul 13, 2008
1,492
0
19,280
" Lets dig a little deeper, though. In Batman, CrossFire simply doesn't do anything for the AMD cards."

don't really have to dig to deep to know what's going on here , the developer of this game , totally caters to nivida and in past games from this series they even went as far to put anti AMD/ati coding in their game remember bat man arkham asylum and it's use of physX , nvidia card running physx = got good frame rates , nvidia card physx runing in software mode = ok frame rates, ATi no physx = ok frame rates , ati with physx running software = poor frames that seemed to lock at 15 fps even when nothing in the scene was running the physx calculations. you can say that "cross fire isn't working" but what really is going on given the dev's history is the game doesn't reconise crossfire at all, that's not AMD's fault that's the developer catering to nvidia again.
 

technoholic

Distinguished
Feb 27, 2008
800
0
19,160
if i were Nvidia, would call this card "non-Ti" 660 and i would produce a card with better memory bandwidth and call it a "Ti". That time it would be an overkill card and force AMD to drop prices a lot.
Nvidia only has gtx680, 670 and at last 660 Ti for desktop in their product line as of now (correct me if i am wrong). 660 Ti performs well (with bad pricing) but is a late comer like 680 and 670. That does not give us much flexibility to choose from IMO. Yes there are custom cards from different manifacturers but they are basically overclocked cards with better cooling. AMD has a more complete product line, from top to toe. Let's see it, AMD's cards are very well segmented in this generation (price/performance-wise) and has more variants for different budgets. IMO that is why we don't see a "wow" factor in current 660 Ti with this price. At the same time, it is now AMD's turn to produce a card which performs in between 7870 and 7950 (call it 7890 or 7900 maybe). Not that AMD can't compete, but because they can push the competition to a harder point for Nvidia. Especially now, when Nvidia faces production issues
 
[citation][nom]technoholic[/nom]if i were Nvidia, would call this card "non-Ti" 660 and i would produce a card with better memory bandwidth and call it a "Ti".[/citation]
They already have that, it is called the GTX 670...
 

blibba

Distinguished
Aug 27, 2008
166
0
18,680
[citation][nom]refillable[/nom]What's Up with reviews on other websites?In Techpoweruphttp://tpucdn.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_ [...] l_1920.gifIt trade blows with a 7950, not a 7870?In Hardwarecanucks:http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/ [...] -TI-82.jpgIt also trade blows with 7950, not 7870?And many more...[/citation]

It's because of two things. Firstly, TH goes with a ton of AA. This favours AMD cards. Secondly, TH puts a lot of store in the "average FPS" metric. This means that the end result is weighted towards the games where FPS was highest - or in other words, the ones we care about least.
 

jimbaladin

Honorable
Aug 16, 2012
17
0
10,510
Good review pointing out the weakness of the 660 Ti. This is what reviews should be like - if you pay $300 for a graphics card you want to know if it will choke with AA settings - and the 660 Ti chockes, splutters and spits it out. If you don't use AA you shouldn't be buying $300 graphics cards.
 

blibba

Distinguished
Aug 27, 2008
166
0
18,680
[citation][nom]jimbaladin[/nom]Good review pointing out the weakness of the 660 Ti. This is what reviews should be like - if you pay $300 for a graphics card you want to know if it will choke with AA settings - and the 660 Ti chockes, splutters and spits it out. If you don't use AA you shouldn't be buying $300 graphics cards.[/citation]

That's if you don't use AA while playing BF3 at >1080p, tbf. I use 4xAA at 2048*1152 and I'm still using a 9800GTX+...
 
G

Guest

Guest
Meh. Gonna wait on Maxwell. Definitely too pricey, coming from a 460 1gig.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.