Gtx 660ti vs amd 7950

I guarantee you everyone is going to recommend the 7950. Why? IDK. The general consensus seems to be that 7950 > 660 ti & sometimes 670. Which I have yet to see proof. Everywhere I have looked the 660 ti destroys the 7950 in bf3. Only time it will lose is if you got past AAx8, which doesnt make much sense to go past x4. I say 660 ti or wait for 670. I am currently also trying to pick between 660 ti and 670. I have until the end of the month to choose. I hope the price will drop on either one by then but it probably wont.

Some people will argue that the 7950 OC's better. In truth they both OC very well. I don't trust many benchmarks anymore. There are never consistent results and some people might be getting paid to misrepresent results. I like to watch youtube videos of people playing to judge performance against the benchmarks. From what I have seen, the 7950 struggles to maintain ~50 fps and the 660 ti does a good job of staying around ~60 in bf3

Get the 7950 you'll make many bitcoins. The benchmarks prove it yo. Plus it's actually better, just look at the toms GPU charts foo.

If you can wait than get the Gtx670. its best price/performance card for $400. If you cant wait then get the 7950.

The 7970 is actually the better price/performance around $400, just not for the specific game combo he mentioned.

I have seen the 7970 get beat by the 670 and sometimes the 660 ti in BF3.

There is a reason why AMD has price dropped their cards and Nvidia has yet to respond. There is also a reason why the 8850 and 8870 were compared to Nvidia's gtx 670 and not their own cards.

And there's a reason Toms hardware says this:


Take the green goggles off. The 660ti only looks good in tests/reviews where minimum framerate is ignored.

Also, no Kepler card can even touch the 7950 for overclocking... 40%+ overclocks from stock are the norm for the 7950. Nothing from Nvidia is even close (nor is anything else from AMD).

That's debatable. AMD has greater overclocking headroom on the good models (some of the good 7950s have more average headroom than the GTX 670 TOP, the best, albeit discontinued, GTX 670 that I'm aware of) that can let you use other settings, higher MSAA efficiency, and can use OpenCL/Direct Compute features such as some advanced lighting features that Nvidia can't do with playable performance on the GTX 600 cards. PhysX is really only an advantage in two modern games, Borderlands 2 and Batman:AC, and eve nthen, AMD ahs their own advantages that can counteract PhysX (such as the huge MSAA advantage that you mentioned).

Yes, the reason is that AMD needs to make more money. They're in debt last I checked, so they need to be more aggressive. Nvidia just doesn't give a crap about lowering prices until they absolutely need to, they just release new cards that make some of their more expensive cards largely irrelevant (GTX 670 to the GTX 680 and GTX 660 to the GTX 660 Ti).

I love the fact that so many AMD fanboys are accusing everyone who isn't of being an Nvidia fanboy. Does it really matter? People have preferred brands, live with it. Yours is AMD.




Mmm, Tom's disagrees with you. OP, save up your money - the 670 is an extremely beastly card that overclocks very well. My friend and I built new rigs at the same time; everything the same except for the video card. (And minor various things that don't affect performance.)

I've got a 670, and he has a 7950. When we're playing at 1920x1080, my rig wrecks his - I'm getting 10-15 more fps than him on ultra. We did an experiment once, though - combining monitors to run with three monitors at once. When we did that, his rig took the advantage, by far.

End result? Go with a 670, as it will happily max out any modern game at 1080p without blinking. If you're playing at stupid high resolutions, go Radeon.

And tomshardware is the one and only official source of all things tech right? go check other websites and live gameplays on youtube and see how the 660 ti annihilates the 7950. I have seen some results from Tom's that dont add up. Also, IIRC Tom's has multiple sites that handle benchmarks. That can cause some conflicting results as well.

When you are already behind you will need a huge OC.

Also, MSI power editions and ASUS tops have OC'd to ~1400mhz

http://hardocp.com/article/2012/08/23/galaxy_gtx_660_ti...

Most 660 Ti reviews have AMD cards using old drivers (some of them even had AMD on the December 2011 driver) and also compared cherrypicked and/or overclocked 660 Tis to stock 7950s. This one did a good overclock on all tested cards such as the GTX 660 Ti 3GB from Galaxy (possibly the best 660 Ti), the GTX 670 TOP from asus, and a Radeon 7950 XFX Black Edition with proper drivers for all cards. Notice how the 7950 won against even the 670. My only issue with this review is that I think that the 670's memory wasn't clocked as high as it could have been, but oh well.

Tom's doesn't disagree, so I don't know where you're getting your information. Also, unless you give full hardware specs for the two comparison machines as wel las configuration, saying something like that is irrelevant. It must be solidly backed up to be worth believing.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-r...

No overclocking. Also, how can the date be September 5th in that review?

Now, I challenge you to find a youtube video of someone with a 7950 holding 60 FPS on Ultra at 1080p at least x4

Since when is Youtube an unbiased source of such information?

L2 Scroll wheel. shows no msaa, then x4 @ 1080p and 1600p. and shows OC on a different page

The 670 will give better performance with high PhysX in BL2 and allows SSAO in Skyrim which gives a big IQ boost. You have to OC the 7950 a fair bit to match the 670 in BF3 - it can do it, but BF3 definitely prefers Kepler to Tahiti.

Also, Toms doesn't disagree with me - dunno what you're seeing there. And TPU, which has many more games in their test suite, shows that the 7970 is, overall, a few % faster than the 670. Not a large difference, but the 670 no longer holds claim to the best overall price/performance on the high end.

I find a youtube video of someone trying to show what their card can do and not being influenced by any type of sponsorship more unbiased than any website.

Youtube is what fanboys, trolls, and conspiracy theorists appeal to when they know that reliable info like benchmarks and reviews won't support their claims.    

I think the argument against the 660 Ti is the minimum frame rate, wich guarantees less lag spikes in the 7950 i guess, and yes youtube vids are not that trustworthy i think.

Sorry, but I'm seen a lot of Youtube videos about such things and not many were unbiased and none that were from less than a few years ago. I'm not saying that there aren't any, but I haven't seen any.

If the 7950 was better than the 670, AMD would not have it priced at the same range as the 660 ti. And if it was better, Nvidia wouldnt be stupid enough to have their most equivalent performer priced $100 more than the competition. That wouldnt make sense from any point of view. If you say greed, it doesnt make sense because you will sell more at a $350 price point than $400 and make more money for your greed.

Honestly, selling a $400 card at $550 because you dont have any current competition sounds more greedy to me.

The minimum frame rate isn't necessarily always extremely low on the 660 Ti, but it's generally lower, not that it's an absolutely empirical metric. Besides, there's more than the minimum frame deficiency to argue against. The 660 Ti is one of the worst cards for overclocking out of the this graphics generation along with other deficiencies, such as MSAA efficiency.

When I say youtube videos, I also mean regular user more so than sponsored channels.

Don't get me wrong. I do think the 7950 is a great card. I just dont like how everyone is chumping off the 660 ti like it is a pos and the 7950 is better than everything, because it isnt.

Anyways, OP, if you go with the 670 or the 7950, you'll be happy either way.
It's highly recommended to avoid the 660ti, however, due to memory bandwidth issues - it'll cause stuttering at higher settings.

Get whichever is cheaper. There really isn't that much of a difference, as you can tell through all this bickering. If BF3 is really THAT important to you get the 660ti. I personally don't like it. If Crysis is important get AMD. For comparison I have a 7870 and Skyrim keeps 60fps with the hd textures. I haven't seen it lower yet. CSGO has minimums of around 160 fps. I use 1920x1080 by the way. Also, BF3 goes from 45-80 fps with AA off and everything Ultra in MP.

The 660 ti can OC to ~1400mhz core and ~7000 on the memory. How is that the worst?

The first sentence couldn't really be more wrong. Not only is the 7950 generally only much better when overclocking is considered (something that is not accounted for in MSRP) for common resolutions, but pricing does not necessarily make sense on anything. Supply and demand is a lie.

Nvidia also doesn't care because they used a huge amount of FUD in the 660 Ti launch. More than half of the reviews of that card use old drivers on the AMD cards as well as unrealistic settings to make the 660 Ti look better than it is (cherry picked cards were also common, but not as common as the above two factors).

AMD is also far mroe monetarily challenged than Nvidia at this time. AMD is in debt. Nvidia is not. Nvidia also has lower BOM on their cards for a variety or reasons such as fewer memory chips and such, so they can afford to sell fewer cards if they have to.

The Radeon 7970 was so expensive at launch because it had to be. Yields were much worse back then, supply was lower as a result of that. They also had it priced to beat the price/performance margins of the time with the GTX 580 3GB, it's closest competitor.

It rarely hits 1.4GHz core clock and it's core clock is irrelevant because it's memory hold it back too much. High memory frequencies are far counteracted by the slimmer memory bus. The 660 Ti can hit high frequencies on both the GPU and memory, especially on the memory with the 3GB models, but it scales performance very badly with increased GPU frequency as a result of its weak memory bus.

Agreed. Both a good 670 and a good 7950 are great options. Some 670s can get as cheap as $340 making them have fairly close overall value to a good 7950.

The problem with the 660 Ti is that it really is an inferior card. It has worse stuttering, worse MSAA scaling, worse overclocking headroom, and other deficiencies. At least the 670 has good overclocking headroom and acceptable MSAA scaling up to 4xMSAA as well as far less stuttering issues than the 660 Ti (not everyone notices it, so this can be argued against as a con, but still).

The 2GB models of the 660 Ti also have an odd 1.5GiB+.5GiB memory configuration where performance starts to drop off around the 1.5GiB mark. This is caused by the last .5GiB being only accessible to one memory controller and thus running at a mere one third of the bandwidth of the first 1.5GiB of memory.

The 7950 is not going to be better than the 670 for him guys. Not with that game selection. Stop trying to argue that. Seriously. When overclocking is considered, yes the 7950 is the better card, but it won't overtake the 670 by much in BF3, overclocking will do nothing to help Borderlands 2 performance, and AMD has nothing to rival SSAO in Skyrim in terms of image quality.

The 670 is the OP's best option.

If you can't afford the 670, then get the 7950. The 660ti is not a good card. And stop spouting off nonsense about the 660ti's overclocking - you're just looking more like a troll. 1400 MHz boost is not a realistic expectation at all. 1250 boost is probably realistic.
http://hwbot.org/hardware/videocard/geforce_gtx_660_ti/

On the other hand, 1150 MHz is a reasonable expectation for the 7950:
http://hwbot.org/hardware/videocard/radeon_hd_7950/

Kepler loses big time in terms of price/performance and loses outright in terms of performance (unless you're comparing 7970 OC to 680 OC, which is a tie) when overclocking is considered. Only the greenest of fanboys will try to argue that.

Oh no not this thread again..BOTH cards will do just fine canned benchmarks dont do any good and everyone had different hardware which means everyone will have different experiences..Yes the memory bandwidth is low on the 660 Ti but the memory speed being at 6Gbps and the cores make up for it..Cant we all just get along and still about the memory controller thing my opinion i dont think it apply ive ran 1.6GB on the 660 Ti and i didnt lag but nvidia only knows the true answer of how they setup the cards

http://us.ncix.com/products/?sku=71127&vpn=67NPH6DV5ZVX...

That's as cheap as the 670s get from what I've seen today. $350 AR.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

That's as cheap as the 7950s get from what I've seen today. $270 AR. Either option is good, but not the best models (just the best for the money).

There is a drop in performance. Nvidia can only do their best to minimize it, but they can't eliminate it. They did a good job of hiding it, but some people still notice it as increased stutter. Even the full memory performance is proven to cause some issues because that and the ROP difference are all that separate the 660 Ti from the 670 in performance. Games tested with the 3GB Model of the 660 Ti that involve high memory capacity without crippling memory bandwidth needs prove that the 660 Ti 2GB's unorthodox memory configuration is inferior.

Do you know what stuttering is" I have yet to hear of this "Stuttering" issue.
There are different forms of stuttering.

*Micro-stuttering- having more frames than your monitor can display and causing them to overlap. curable by vsync.
*Low FPS- stuttering due to low frames per second, or lag in some cases.
*Bad Drivers- bad driver support.

I dont think I have heard of any card having stuttering issues beyond the aforementioned cases.

The 660ti really? Come on guys I mean I like Nvidia I have two 680's but at this time with the current performance/Pricing nothing can touch AMD at this time. A 7950 is the best bang for the buck by far, a 660 and a 7950 shouldnt even be used in the same sentence. Now the 670 is a great card unfortunately its pricing puts it square infront of the 7970 which is better at everything.

The second type of stutter that you mentioned is the type of stutter caused by this.

Are you talking about texture stuttering? Cause I have seen that before from both camps.

The 680 is not inferior to the 7970 in everything, just on average and even then, only slightly so at stock.

Maybe you should read the thread before posting...  

*hint* - Open the thread, hit ctrl+F, type "stutter" and see what you get.

Memory bandwidth constraints can produce stutter, in the same way that a lack of ram/vram can.

Memory bandwidth is cut from 144GB/s to 48GB/s on the last .5GiB of memory. Take a guess at the ramifications of that.

He probably thinks its a conspiracy unless he's seen it from some random person on youtube  

Your website shows the 660 ti beating the 7950. Albeit at stock, but the 660 ti seems to be doing well for a pos and it seems to be overclocking nicely.
http://hardocp.com/article/2012/09/17/asus_geforce_gtx_...

They also seem to be getting 7000mhz on the memory. That's odd
http://hardocp.com/article/2012/09/03/msi_gtx_660_ti_po...