Upgrade from GTS 450?

[mikes1992]

Hey I want to upgrade from a GTS 450 and was wondering what card to choose

My current specs are
i5 2400 @ 3.6ghz
8gb of corsair XMS3 ram
Motherboard: MSI P67A-G45 (B3)
Corsair TX650v2 PSU
Evga GTS 450, 920mhz core/4.1ghz memory.

I was thinking about either £180 for a GTX 660 or £230 for a GTX 660 ti. Is there much improvement for an extra £50? ($80)

Is the GTX 660 a worthy upgrade from my GTS 450?
How much of a performance boost will I get?

I've heard allot of people recommend not to buy the GTX 660 ti because the performance balance of the GTX 660s is bad (like the memory being too slow for the processor)... I also heard that the card is held back due to computation limitations. I'm pretty sure it'll be much faster then my GTS 450 and 144GB/s is going to be a big improvement from 65GB/s.

I'm going to be playing at 1920x1080 on a single screen.

I want to stick with an Nvidia card for Physx...


Thanks in advance!

 

[Supernova1138]

You'll get a huge performance increase over a GTS 450 with either card. The drawbacks of the Kepler cards is generally poor GPU compute performance (which doesn't really effect gaming right now outside of a couple of specific titles) and the 660s have a narrow memory bus (only 192 bit, most cards in its class have a 256 bit memory bus). The narrow memory bus can effect game performance negatively, especially if you crank up Anti Aliasing. It's inconsistent though, some games like Battlefield 3 are largely unaffected by the narrow memory bus, other games like Batman Arkham City will take a large performance hit if you use more than 2x AA.

Because of the inconsistent performance of the 660 cards, I generally would say not to consider anything from Nvidia below the GTX 670 right now. If you are dead set on Nvidia and can't afford the 670, I'd say get the 660 non Ti. The 660Ti is not a big enough boost over the plain 660 to justify the extra cost. Odds are you can probably overclock the plain 660 to perform just like the 660Ti if you really wanted to. The extra $80 spent on the 660Ti will net you a 10% overall performance boost at best, though this will vary from game to game, not really worth it for that much money.

 

[mikes1992]

Thanks for the informative info supernova.

...I just realised that I've opened this as a discussion

 

[mikes1992]

Maybe I should wait for the next generation of graphics cards? I'm sure I can live with a GTS 450 a little longer. Isn't the 700 series due next year?... well I assume it will be the 700 series. But you probably won't be able to get mid range cards till summer though... :/

I'm not going to lie... I've got a compensation claim currently pending, which is the reason I'm considering spending my savings on a new GPU. the case could take upto 6 months but they estimated a total of 10 hours work. Maybe I should just wait till that goes through and I get results.

 

[Supernova1138]

The 700 series will be coming out next year, though with Nvidia, you are probably right in that their midrange offerings won't be out until well into 2013. If Nvidia launches new cards too soon, nobody would buy the cards they are selling right now. Nvidia also made a killing with their trickle down release schedule this generation, as people got tired of waiting and shelled out extra money for the higher end offerings. Nvidia may seek to repeat that, even if it means not competing at all below the $400 to $500 price point for several months. Nvidia knows there are a lot of consumers out there that will absolutely refuse to buy AMD and will either wait, or pay a large price premium for an Nvidia card.

If you are still happy with the GTS 450's performance, you can wait for another year, though the GTS 450 might start to become barely adequate to run the more demanding titles by next year.