Future Games memory bandwidth demand

thats just the author speculating....what that really means is that the memory bus will be the limiting factor on the card...basically the slowest part of the card is the memory throughput...if that makes sense....If I were you and you were choosing between those two cards I would def go 7950 its a great card and is really good value.

id actually stick to a 7870 given there is one that is selling for 229.99 and the performance differrence between the 7870 and the 7950 is not enough to justify the extra 80 dollars

damn thats a good deal just checked the prices on newegg and there is a HIS 7870 going for $220 plus shipping after rebate...thats pretty sweet.

Nvidia made a concious decision to use a narrow memory bus to reduce the performance of the 660. Its nothing new both companies have been reducing the size of the memory bus for a while now, both to reduce the performance of a GPU chip down to a selected performance level so that it fits into the segment they want it to and mainly to reduce the manufacturing costs.

The 660 is the first card where its really really noticeable without going looking for it.

People see the fact that the card struggles against cards with a higher bandwidth when AA ans MSAA etc are used as a negative. Considering where the card is priced they have a point I guess.

As with a lot of things the results are game dependant and if you like lots of AA/MSAA then the larger memory bus of other cards would be better for you.
If you look at some of the on-line results you will see that the 660 is quite close to the 660Ti in performance. this is why they reduced the bandwidth. So that its worth getting the more expensive card.

Take a look at this analysis Toms did http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/geforce-gtx-660-geforce-g...


Today's games can use more bandwidth than the 660 has, that's not to say that other cards will struggle with newer games.

Mactronix  

The 660 Ti was designed for the vast majority of consumers who play at 1080 or 1200 resolution with AA settings around 4x or less. With that in mind it is a perfect card for those conditions and should be on a short list of options as it tends to outperform it's similarly priced competition. With a view to the future, that's not going to change.

It trades blows with the 7950 depending on the title, and it looks best when you ignore minimum framerates. When you look at benchmarks that look at minimum framerates, it doesn't beat the 7950 overall.

Anand's statement is just speculation, as others have said. The memory bus is the weakness of the card, and that shows up in minimum framerates and situations where resolution or AA is cranked up.

Given that, it makes the card a risky option compared to the similarly-priced/cheaper 7950, which is a more well balanced card overall. The 660ti is really not an easy card to recommend - the GTX 660 or 670 are much better options from Nvidia. The 670 is more well balanced, and the 660 is at a price point where you don't expect great performance at high AA levels.

At first i was like meh but i agree with you on this..I kinda wished i copped a 670 honestly