Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 And 660 Review: Kepler At $110 And $230
We have two new graphics cards in the lab today: Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650 and 660, filling the gap between its GeForce GT 640 and GTX 660 Ti with Kepler derivatives. Are these GK107- and GK106-based boards able to challenge the Radeon HD 7750 and 7850?
OpenCL: GPGPU Benchmarks (Basemark CL)
Fluid Operations
The OEM GeForce GTX 660 ekes out a lead over the retail model. Both variants trail the GeForce GTX 660 Ti and 570 by a wide margin, though.
Wave Simulation
This time around, the tables turn and clock rate trumps compute resources. At the same time, Nvidia’s current generation doesn’t seem to improve performance compared to the Fermi-based cards.
The Radeon HD 7870 is the biggest surprise among AMD's cards, finishing ahead of the newly-boosted Radeon HD 7950. Overall, the field is grouped much tighter than in previous benchmarks.
Julia Rendering
Again, clock rate is king, and the GK106-based card beats out the OEM version of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 660, tying with the GTX 660 Ti.
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Mandelbulb Rendering
While Julia rendering embarrassed Nvidia's hardware, the Mandelbulb test (a three-dimensional version of the Mandelbrot set) is far favorable to the Fermi- and Kepler-based cards. This is another test that rewards frequency over compute resources, and the GeForce GTX 660 comfortably holds its own against the GTX 580 and 570.
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