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I'm trying to decide if it's worth it to upgrade my 560 Ti to an EVGA 660 Ti..

I can get:
660 Ti FTW+ 3GB for $331 + $10 MIR
or
660 Ti+ 3GB for $303 + $20 MIR

Would either of these be worth it for gaming? I've got a Korean 27" IPS (2560x1440) monitor, core-i7 3770K, 16GB RAM.

Mostly playing StarCraft 2, Skyrim, Fallen Enchantress... I'll also be getting Star Citizen when it comes out . I've had a few CTDs on Ultra settings in SC2... I was thinking of dialing the settings down, but since I've got this opportunity, I thought I'd look into it..

Appreciate the advice!

Probably, but I'd be tempted to stretch a little further for 2560x1440. HD7870 or GTX670 for just a little more oomph.

The 660Ti is definitely worth it over a 560Ti though.

For your giant monitor, I would say yes, without a doubt it's a worthwhile upgrade. If you were on 1080p I'd be less enthusiastic.

This Powercolor 7870 Myst Edition: $239 after $10 MIR is much better value than the GTX 660Ti. Tahiti LE (cut-down 7950) will give you similar performance to the 660Ti for close to $70 less, and comes with Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider to boot.

And to top it off, the Radeons are out-overclocking the Geforces at the moment due to the power limits in the Geforce cards (typically 114% for most 660Ti cards).

This coming from a (happy) GTX 660 owner.

For the 670, I can get:

670 FTW+ 4GB for $428

or

670 FTW Sig2 or 670 FTW 2GB for $390..

From the reviews here on TR, the 670 doesn't appear to be worth the extra $100-$120, unless I'm missing something..

These are all through an EPP, so no Radeons for me..

If you look solely at 2560x1600 results, the 660Ti is ~65% 54% faster on average than the 560 Ti. So yes, a worthwhile upgrade.

EDIT: Sorry, had some bad numbers in my spreadsheet that gave an erroneous 65% improvement; revised figure to 54%. Still a worthwhile upgrade.

Voldenuit wrote:

If you look solely at 2560x1600 results, the 660Ti is ~65% faster on average than the 560 Ti. So yes, a worthwhile upgrade.

I don't really see how this is possible, since I went from a GTX460 to a GTX Titan and I don't really feel like it's 65% faster. :lol: (」・ω・)」

I definitely wouldn't bother upgrading from a GTX560Ti, and certainly not to a card with a weaker memory interface. Even on your giant monitor, are you really having trouble running things? Granted I was only in 1080p, but on my GTX460 I had encountered very few games that I felt like I wasn't able to run.

auxy wrote:

Voldenuit wrote:

If you look solely at 2560x1600 results, the 660Ti is ~65% faster on average than the 560 Ti. So yes, a worthwhile upgrade.

I don't really see how this is possible, since I went from a GTX460 to a GTX Titan and I don't really feel like it's 65% faster. (」・ω・)」

I definitely wouldn't bother upgrading from a GTX560Ti, and certainly not to a card with a weaker memory interface. Even on your giant monitor, are you really having trouble running things? Granted I was only in 1080p, but on my GTX460 I had encountered very few games that I felt like I wasn't able to run.

At 1080p, it isn't, unless you're running at 120Hz. But at 2560x1600, one GTX670 was almost fast enough for me; I wouldn't want to go less than a GTX660Ti or the above-mentioned HD7870 with a full-size chip. Also, 2GB isn't a limitation for these cards at ~4MP, which I can verify with Battlefield 3 and Skyrim with a few mods. Certainly you can push against it, but by the time >2GB will be necessary, you're going to want a faster card.

I went from a 2GB 6950 to a 7950 at 2560x1440 and the difference was massive.

Once you get to that resolution, you need a GK104 with minimum castration or a full-blown Tahiti, IMO.
Sure, you can dial back quality settings and disable graphics to increase the framerate, but if you were willing to do that you probably wouldn't have bothered buying a 4MP screen in the first place.....

FWIW, I was happy with both a GTX460 and an HD6850 at 1080p, and the jump up to 2560 resolutions was enough to completely ruin the experience for me with that hardware. I borrowed a 6950 from work hoping that would be enough of a boost, but it was still slower at 2560x1440 than the 6850 had been at 1080p.

Resolution is a bear. I did the same thing- a single HD6950 wasn't fast enough, and a single GTX570, while a little faster, only had 1.25GB of RAM, which also wasn't enough.

Two HD6950's were fast, but certain things (like BF3) were choppier. I thought it was BF3 until [H] started ragging on AMD for providing a solution that turned frames faster but felt slower than the Nvidia cards, and when I put in a single GTX670 (the blower-based HD7950 didn't exist and the HD7970's were too loud), I was happy. A second card makes it fast enough to turn settings up for upcoming games.

Sounds I should plan on the upgrade, (I've got about 2 weeks to decide), and I should either go for the 660 Ti+ at $283 or the 670 for $428? Is the $150 going to be worth it?

Airmantharp wrote:

Resolution is a bear. I did the same thing- a single HD6950 wasn't fast enough, and a single GTX570, while a little faster, only had 1.25GB of RAM, which also wasn't enough.

Resolution has a big effect on your performance, due to exponentially increased demands on fill rate, but it has almost no effect on your VRAM usage. A 1920x1080x32bpp render target is only 24Mbytes triple-buffered; 2560x1440x32bpp is 45mbytes triple-buffered. Even if you add 2x2 ("4x") SSAA, that's 176mbytes triple-buffered at 2560x1440x32bpp. Whoop-de-doo! °˖✧◝(⁰▿⁰)◜✧˖°

auxy, your math may be off.

- A single 1920x1080 frame is ~8MB. Multi-sampled 4x, it's ~126MB.
- A single 2560x1600 frame is ~16MB. Multi-sampled 4x, it's ~250MB ( (2560 x 4) x (1600 x 4) x 4 ).

Take into account extra VRAM requirements for double and triple-buffering, texture mip-maps (which will increase), depth buffers, etc, and - via Mark I eyeball - you can easily looking at half to a gig over the requirement for 1920, if not more.

Of course, someone with a 3GB graphics card can easily use GPU-Z for monitoring and put this dilemma to rest.

Voldenuit wrote:

If you look solely at 2560x1600 results, the 660Ti is ~65% faster on average than the 560 Ti. So yes, a worthwhile upgrade.

Agree with this. Also bear in mind this assessment, comparing 660 Ti with Radeon 7870:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/548?vs=647

For cost and power savings, I would probably get a 660 (regular) instead of a 660 Ti.

General takeway is that 660-series is going to be more performant and have lower power consumption than most Radeon 78xx.

druidcent wrote:

Sounds I should plan on the upgrade, (I've got about 2 weeks to decide), and I should either go for the 660 Ti+ at $283 or the 670 for $428? Is the $150 going to be worth it?

GTX 670 is, on average 17% faster than the 660Ti. Whether that's worth the 51% price premium is up to you.

PS JdL has a point about the GTX 660. With identical memory bandwidth as the 660 Ti and similar ROP rates, it should maintain the same delta at 2560x1440 as it does at 1920x1080 (most sites don't test the 660 at 2560 res), which is around 12-15% slower than the 660Ti. But it would only be about 33% faster than your 560Ti so may not be as big of an upgrade.

morphine wrote:

auxy, your math may be off.

- A single 1920x1080 frame is ~8MB. Multi-sampled 4x, it's ~126MB.
- A single 2560x1600 frame is ~16MB. Multi-sampled 4x, it's ~250MB ( (2560 x 4) x (1600 x 4) x 4 ).

My math wasn't really off. I said 24MB for 1920x1080x32bpp triple-buffer (three 8Mbyte frames) and 45Mbytes for triple-buffer 2560x1440x32bpp. That's the size of the framebuffer before you start adding tricks like MSAA into the equation. I think your MSAA math might be wrong, though.

morphine wrote:

Take into account extra VRAM requirements for double and triple-buffering, texture mip-maps (which will increase), depth buffers, etc, and - via Mark I eyeball - you can easily looking at half to a gig over the requirement for 1920, if not more.

The textures won't increase the size of the render target; or, to put it more clearly, the screen resolution has little-to-nothing to do with the amount of video memory the textures use.

morphine wrote:

Of course, someone with a 3GB graphics card can easily use GPU-Z for monitoring and put this dilemma to rest.

You would think, but that only tells you GPU RAM usage, not which part is textures and which part is buffer.

I'd be really curious for a tool which can do this too; it'd help a lot with game performance troubleshooting (which I spend many hours doing for friends, family, and total strangers on the internet.)

Voldenuit wrote:

GTX 670 is, on average 17% faster than the 660Ti. Whether that's worth the 51% price premium is up to you.

Unless you enable non-postprocessing anti-aliasing, like MSAA or SSAA; then the gap widens quickly. Those extra 64-bits of memory bandwidth -- and extra ROPs to go along -- help a LOT. Look here: Tom's Hardware: Seven GeForce GTX 660 Ti Cards: Exploring Memory Bandwidth The 660Ti loses out to a lowly Radeon 7870 at 8x MSAA.

Of course, Kepler with 256-bit RAM still sucks at AA, but it sucks a lot less...

Please keep this here and don't send Morphine off looking for validation, since he or I may strangle each other. Please carry on.

Going back to the 670 vs 660Ti argument, have you considered a 7950 Boost? for $270 after rebate?

There was a point when the 7950 was an even match to the 660Ti but AMD's driver improvements mean it's getting closer to the GTX670 than it is to the 660Ti these days. Not that it matters (yet) but I think the massively more powerful compute ability of the 7950 might be useful for games in the future, since more and more stuff is using OpenCL and DirectCompute, whilst PhysX is little more than overdone paricle gimmickery that most people prefer to disable so that they can actually see what they're doing instead.

Personal reasons, but I'd prefer to stay with the Green team.. especially since the perf seems to be pretty close together.. (all three, 660 Ti, 670, 7950 boost). If it still hasn't cleared up, I may just stick with the 560 Ti.. It is more of a want than a need to upgrade.. I was just trying to see if it would be worth it to do so.. The consensus is yes, but also look into the 7950's...