The GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review, Feat. EVGA, Zotac, and Gigabyte
by Ryan Smith on August 16, 2012 9:00 AM ESTThe First TXAA Game & The Test
With the release of the NVIDIA’s 304.xx drivers a couple of months ago, NVIDIA finally enabled driver support on Kepler for their new temporal anti-aliasing technology. First announced with the launch of Kepler, TXAA is another anti-aliasing technology to be developed by Timothy Lottes, an engineer in NVIDIA’s developer technology group. In a nutshell, TXAA is a wide tent (>1px) MSAA filter combined with a temporal filter (effectively a motion-vector based frame blend) that is intended to resolve that pesky temporal aliasing that can be seen in motion in many games.
Because TXAA requires MSAA support and motion vector tracking by the game itself, it can only be used in games that specifically implement it. Consequently, while NVIDIA had enabled driver support for it, they’ve been waiting on a game to be released that implements it. That release finally happened last week with a patch for the MMO The Secret World, which became the first game with TXAA support.
This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive review of TXAA (MMOs and deterministic testing are like oil and water), but seeing as how this is the first time TXAA has been enabled we did want to comment on it.
On the whole, what NVIDIA is trying to accomplish here is to implement movie-like anti-aliasing at a reasonable performance cost. Traditionally SSAA would be the solution here (just like it is to most other image aliasing problems), but of course SSAA is much too expensive most of the time. At its lower setting it is just 2x MSAA plus the temporal component, which makes the process rather cheap.
Unfortunately by gaming standards it’s also really blurry. This is due to the combination of the wide tent MSAA samples – which if you remember your history, ATI tried at one time – and the temporal filter blending data from multiple frames. TXAA does a completely fantastic job of eliminating temporal and other forms of aliasing, but it does so at a notable cost to image clarity.
Editorially speaking we’ll never disparage NVIDIA for trying new AA methods – it never hurts to try something new – however at the same time we do reserve the right to be picky. We completely understand the direction NVIDIA went with this and why they did it, especially since there’s a general push to make games more movie-like in the first place, but we’re not big fans of the outcome. You would be hard pressed to find someone that hates jaggies more than I (which is why we have SSAA in one of our tests), but as an interactive medium I have come to expect sharpness, sharpness that would make my eyes bleed. Especially when it comes to multiplayer games, where being able to see the slightest movement in the distance can be a distinct advantage.
To that end, TXAA is unquestionably an interesting technology and worth keeping an eye on in the future, but practically speaking AMD’s efforts to implement complex lighting cheaply on a forward renderer (and thereby making MSAA cheap and effective) are probably more relevant to improving the state of AA. But this is by no means the final word, and we’ll certainly revisit TXAA in detail in the future once it’s enabled on a game that offers a more deterministic way of testing image quality.
The Test
NVIDIA’s GTX 660 Ti launch drivers are 305.37, which are a further continuation of the 304.xx branch. Compared to the previous two 304.xx drivers there are no notable performance changes or bug fixes that we’re aware of.
Meanwhile on the AMD side we’re continuing to use the Catalyst 12.7 betas released back in late June. AMD just released Catalyst 12.8 yesterday, which appear to be a finalized version of the 12.7 driver.
On a final note, for the time being we have dropped Starcraft II from our tests. The recent 1.5 patch has had a notable negative impact on our performance (and disabled our ability to play replays without logging in every time), so we need to further investigate the issue and likely rebuild our entire collection of SC2 benchmarks.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | EVGA X79 SLI |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.2.3.1022 |
| Power Supply: | Antec True Power Quattro 1200 |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung 470 (256GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1867 4 x 4GB (8-10-9-26) |
| Case: | Thermaltake Spedo Advance |
| Monitor: |
Samsung 305T Asus PA246Q |
| Video Cards: |
AMD Radeon HD 6970 AMD Radeon HD 7870 AMD Radeon HD 7950 AMD Radeon HD 7950B AMD Radeon HD 7970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 Zotac GeForce GTX 660 Ti AMP! Edition EVGA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Superclocked Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660 Ti OC NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 304.79 Beta NVIDIA ForceWare 305.37 AMD Catalyst 12.7 Beta |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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TheJian - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
660 can go to 1100/1200 as easily as the 7950 gets to 1150 (so another 10% faster)..Check the asus card I linked to before. You'll have a hard time catching the 660 no matter what, it costs you also as noted by anandtech, my comments on watts/cost/heat etc.Memory bandwidth isn't the issue. here and all of it overclocks fairly close. We don't run in 2560x1600. It's not the weakness. That is a misnomer perpetuated by Ryan beating it like a dead horse when only 2% of users use any res above 1920x1200. I just debunked that idea further by showing even monitors at newegg including 27 inchers don't use that res. IE, no, bandwidth isn't the problem. Bad review on ryan's part, and no conclusion is the problem. The CORE clock/boost is the thing when it's not an bandwidth issue, and it's already been shown to not be true.. LOL, yep, nvidia conspiracy, the minimums were used here to...ROFL. Good luck digging for things wrong with 660TI. Minimums are shown at hardocp, guru3d, anandtech and more. Strange thing you even brought this up with no proof.
The NV cards have only been upped 100mhz, which is about ~10%, not 20 like you say. 915/1114 isn't 20%. You CAN get there, but not in out of box exp. I'd guess nearly all of the memory will hit 6.6ghz. Common for 7970OC / gtx680 to hit 7+ghz.
Galidou - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
I said 20% because most of their cards are way above reference clocks, I was just representing the reality, not the reference thingys. When you can buy factory overclocked cards at the same price, let's say 10$ premium, mentioning the reference clocks is almost... useless. Plus over the internet, 80% of the reviews had factory overclocked cards so the performance we see everywhere and is in everyone's head, is close to 20% overclock has been done.So in fact there's maybe 10-15% of the juice left for fellow overclockers. I'm estimating, it could be more in the case of better chips. While the 7950 as we know it, has been reviewed everywhere on it's reference clocks/fan and if you take an aftermarket cooler and get, let's be honest and say 40%, it's far ahead in terms of comparison from the reference reviews we have.
And again and for the last time, it all depends on the games.
Galidou - Monday, August 20, 2012 - link
When I look at things again and again. the memory bandwidth doesn't seem to be much of a problem. The only games where I can guess it could harm it is any new games that will come out with directx11 heavy graphics. Something that taxes the cards on every aspects, else than that, for now, the card doesn't seem to have any weaknesses at all.I never thought that for the moment it was a real weakness for it, the future will tell us but even there, 90% of the gamers plays at 1080p or less and 80% of that 90% pays less than 150$ for their video cards. For those paying more, it all depends on choosen side, games they play, overclocking or not and money they want to spend.
Remove overclocking of the way Nvidia wins almost everything by a good margin. Anyone playing 1080p won't be deceived by any 200$+ card if they are not so inclined playing everything on ultra with 8x MSAA.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
You're going to have a CRAP experience and stuttering junk on your eyefinity in between crashes.Come back and apologize to me, and then thejian can hang his head and tell you he tried to warn you.
CeriseCogburn - Thursday, August 23, 2012 - link
Here's the WARNING for you again, with the 660Ti STOMPING your dreamy 7950 into the turf in Skyrim at 2560 x 1080http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/08/16/nvidia...
RussianSensation - Thursday, August 16, 2012 - link
Hey Ryan,In Shogun 2 and Batman AC at 1080P almost none of the new cards are being stressed. I think you should increase the quality to Ultra for the new 2-3GB generation of cards even if the < 1.5GB VRAM cards suffer and bump AA to 8X in Batman. Otherwise all the cards have no problem passing these benchmarks. Same with SKYRIM, maybe think about adding heavy mods OR testing that game with SSAA or 8xAA at least. Even the 6970 is getting > 83 fps. Maybe you can start thinking of replacing some of these games. They aren't getting very demanding anymore for the new generation of cards.
Ryan Smith - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
Russian, it's unlikely that we'll ever bump AA up to 8x. I hate jaggies, but the only thing 8x AA does is to superficially slow things down; the quality improvement isn't even negligable. If 4x MSAA doesn't get rid of jaggies in a game, then the problem isn't MSAA.Consequently this is why we use SSAA on Portal 2. High-end cards are fast enough to use SSAA at a reasonable speed. Ultimately many of these games will get replaced in the next benchmark refresh, but if we need to throw up extra roadblocks in the future it will be in the form of TrSSAA/AAA or SSAA, just like we did with Portal 2.
Biorganic - Saturday, August 18, 2012 - link
I was speaking a bit on both. The article insinuates that the 660ti is on the same performance level as the 7950. The obvious caveat to your results is that it is ridiculously easy to overclock the 7950 by 35-45%, and GCN performance scales pretty well with clock increases. It should be noted in the article that the perf of 7950 OC'd is beyond what the 660ti can attain. Unless you guys can OC a 660ti sample by 30% or more.CeriseCogburn - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
Is this the exact same way we recommended the GTX460 reviews ? With some supermassive OC in the reviews, so we could really see what the great GTX 460 could do ?NO>>>>>>>
The EXACT OPPOSITE occurred here, by all of your type people.
Did we demand the 560Ti be OC'ed to show how it surpasses the amd series ? NOPE.
Did we go on and on about how massive the GTX580 gains were with OC even though it was already far, far ahead of all the amd cards with it's very low core clocks ? NOPE - here we heard power whines.
Did we just complain that the GTX680 is not even in the review while the 7970 is ?
Nope.
How about the GTX 470 or 480 ? Very low cores, where were all of you then demanding they be OC'ed because they gained massively.. ?
Huh, where were you ?
Galidou - Sunday, August 19, 2012 - link
Performance scales pretty well on both design but AMD just is a little better at overclocking because it seems like the base clock is terribly underclocked. It just feels like that but that must be for power constraints and noise on reference designs.