Nvidia fires up $300 GeForce GTX 660 Ti GPU



Nvidia has debuted its 28nm Kepler-powered GeForce GTX 660 Ti GPU at a $300 price point. 



Company reps describe the discrete card as a “dramatic upgrade,” as the GPU is 41 percent faster on average than the GTX 560 Ti from 2011 – and 58 percent faster on average than the GTX 470 from 2010.

As expected, the 660 Ti is loaded with some pretty sweet specs, including  support for DirectX 11 tessellation, TXAA and PhysX. The GTX 660 Ti is also fully capable of driving a 3+1 display configuration from a single card.

The GTX 660 Ti was recently benchmarked by the folks over at Hot Hardware, who confirmed the GPU “performed well” throughout the testing process.

“Despite being overclocked, the performance of the four GeForce GTX 660 Ti cards we tested just missed the mark set by the reference GeForce GTX 670, but in every cases the performance deltas separating the 660 Ti cards from their higher-end counterpart were minimal,” explained Hot Hardware’s Marco Chiappetta.



“In comparison to the original Radeon HD 7950, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti is somewhat faster overall. A couple of tests leaned in AMD’s favor, but more often than not the GeForce GTX 660 Ti pulled ahead. Versus the refreshed Radeon HD 7950 with Boost, which increases the Radeon’s base GPU clock from 800MHz to 850MHz and adds a peak Boost clock up to 925MHz, the competition is a bit more intense. The higher-clocked Radeon HD 7950 competes much better with the GeForce GTX 660 Ti to the point where they’re evenly matched in terms of performance. The edge in power consumption and price, however, goes to Nvidia.”



According to Chiappetta, anyone looking for a graphics card in the $300 price range would be well served by the GeForce GTX 600 Ti. 


“Nvidia’s got another winner on their hands and continues to push the price/performance envelope with Kepler,” he added. 



The GTX 660 Ti GPU has already tipped up in a number of custom-built rigs such as those designed by MainGear and Origin PC, which the latter describes as a “triple threat of power, performance and affordability.”