Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs AMD Radeon HD 7950

ShardTheOwl

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Mar 9, 2013
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So I am going to build a Gaming PC soon, and I've been having some trouble deciding between the 2. I've heard there were driver issues and that the fan is loud and it gets hot easily with the 7950? I don't know which one I should get, lots of people seem to reccomend the 7950 over the 660 Ti.
 
Solution


Well the two cards are powerful enough that choosing one or the other won't make a difference at all on your gameplay in these games.

However, I think games might begin to be more optimized for ATI cards in the near future, because both the PS4 and the Xbox 720 will use ATI cards. Developers tend to first develop games with consoles in mind (because that's where most of their profits come from), and then make adjustments for PC versions, so PC versions of the games might also be more optimized for ATI tech (and might use more of the GPGPU capacities of ATI cards for example, which Nvidia cards don't have as much). Just my opinion.
The 7950 is faster i do not know about driver issues do you mean AMD has been having problems with frame latency, meaning that higher frame rates don't translate into smoother gameplay?If so they have tried to address the issue in recent driver updates.
 

Johnny828

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Mar 14, 2012
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Well the two cards are powerful enough that choosing one or the other won't make a difference at all on your gameplay in these games.

However, I think games might begin to be more optimized for ATI cards in the near future, because both the PS4 and the Xbox 720 will use ATI cards. Developers tend to first develop games with consoles in mind (because that's where most of their profits come from), and then make adjustments for PC versions, so PC versions of the games might also be more optimized for ATI tech (and might use more of the GPGPU capacities of ATI cards for example, which Nvidia cards don't have as much). Just my opinion.
 
Solution
As a single card solution, the 7950 would be better with 3GB of 384 Bit VRAM. It easily overclocks to beat the 670 and 7970 and performance scales very well to larger resolutions, especially with high levels of AA enabled. Currently AMD is leading in triple monitor (Eyefinity) gaming.

If you are going to add a second card in the future, you'd be better off the the 660 Ti as it has no microstutter issues with SLI. Nvidia cards are also the choice if you are going to play in 3D. It has hardware Physx and CUDA if they are of importance to you.

As for the issue of GPU temperatures and fan noise, it really depends on the cooler provided by the different manufacturers. Look for user reviews of each brand of card at Newegg and avoid those with a lot of noise/heat complaints.

Personally, I got the Sapphire 7950. Overclocked to 1050Mhz core and 1450Mhz memory, it beats the 7970 for only ~$300. At stock voltage and has never exceeded 60 degrees. Blazing fast, maxes settings at 1080p on all my games except Arma 3 and Crysis 3 (Very high).
At this performance level all you really need is 1 card, so I chose the 7950 and never looked back.
 
TechPowerUp swapped out some of their older games for newer ones, and the GTX 660 Ti now seems to have an insignificant edge. This is to be expected as Nvidia generally provides better support for newer games, while AMD tends to take some time to squash game-specific bugs and provide improved performance on recent games.

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http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Inno3D/iChill_GTX_650_Ti_Boost/26.html
 

Johnny828

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That. And besides, incoming games are being made for consoles that have ATI cards, so you might start seeing less PhysX and more ATI technology.
 




actually, the consoles were given a contract to be able to use the cpu compute based Physx on the console. so physx can still be used on them, just not at the same extent that a full blown nvidia gpu would do. Nvidia probably allowed that so that Physx would still be viable in the upcoming AMD advertised gaming world
 
Nvidia significantly outsells AMD in the gaming segment

 

That may be true, but that means developers will use PhysX sparingly since it is slow to compute on the CPU.
 


It depends, there's always that chance that Nvidia pusposely chose to optimize physx on CUDA cores and played with coding to make it run worse on the cpu. I mean originally, these effects are all cpu based. Nvidia could have probably loosened up the code for physx if it mean it would be implemented on a console game.
 


both have their applications. I'd go for the bonuses though. the 7950 will have Crysis 3/Bioshock/FC3:Blood Dragon
the 660ti will have Metro Last Light on participating stores