nVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti Pro Reviews

In the end this all reinforces our stance that memory bandwidth isn't everything, and people seeking out video cards for gaming should not focus so intently on the memory bus width and bandwidth specification for determining their video card for gaming. Other factors go into it, and only through actually gameplay will you know how these truly perform side-by-side. That is why we here at [H]ardOCP actually play games with these video cards and use that real-world gaming performance to determine which card your money is better spent on. Benchmarks and the like cannot tell you this real-world information, and can be extremely misleading. Take for example a test that stresses memory bandwidth and fills it to the brim, sure, the 7950 would win that test, but that test doesn't translate to what we just found out in real-world gaming. Performances were close between these cards, and in some cases faster on the card with the lesser bus and bandwidth. So focus on what real-world gaming tells you. Our testing today at super high AA settings has shown that the "bus limited" GeForce GTX 660 Ti does not crumble so easily. There were no instances where we ran into "VRAM wall"s that took gaming performance into single digits, this never happened even at high AA settings with Transparency AA.

The GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2GB card from NVIDIA based on the GK104 Kepler chip continues the trend of dominating GPU releases from NVIDIA. The card is able to not only wipe the floor with the HD 7870 for $30 more, it can hit above its class too competing with the Radeon HD 7950 3GB card, even with the new Boosted BIOS for $50 less. Gamers that didn't want to spend $400 or $500 on a new graphics cards but fell in love with the performance and efficiency of the Kepler architecture will find a lot to like with the GeForce GTX 660 Ti and I imagine retailers will be shuffling through quite a few of them this week.

Nvidia’s GTX 660 Ti speeds past AMD and snatches the crown as the mid-range graphics champion

Due to its relatively narrow performance envelope, we really don’t see the GTX 660 Ti forcing AMD’s hand on the HD 7950 (now $330) or HD 7870 (now $260) pricing front like the GTX 670 and GTX 680 did with higher end SKUs. Naturally, some cuts here and there could be warranted, especially when you consider the GTX 660 Ti’s impressive showing at standard resolutions but we don't expect much movement for now. Nonetheless, there is no denying NVIDIA’s latest entry into a highly competitive market has already driven costs down, making great performance all that much more affordable for gamers.