Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3 (DirectX 11)
Battlefield 3™ leaps ahead of its time with the power of Frostbite 2, DICE's new cutting-edge game engine. This state-of-the-art technology is the foundation on which Battlefield 3 is built, delivering enhanced visual quality, a grand sense of scale, massive destruction, dynamic audio and character animation utilizing ANT technology as seen in the latest EA SPORTS™ games.
Frostbite 2 now enables deferred shading, dynamic global illumination and new streaming architecture. Sounds like tech talk? Play the game and experience the difference!
Our Settings for Battlefield 3
Here is our testing run through the game, for your reference.
Although we only tested two resolutions for this roundup – 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 – we found that two cards stuck out a bit in terms of performance. The most notable was the the Zotac card with its highest default clock speeds, and the only one with overclocked memory speeds out of the box. With more memory bandwidth than any other GPU, it actually sees a 7% performance advantage over the slowest of the four cards!
Is there any reason to think
Is there any reason to think that the stock version of these cards couldn’t overclock to the level of the OC cards?
For example, the regular ZOTAC card looks to have the same cooler and configuration otherwise.
No, not really, they likely
No, not really, they likely could. Just a matter of what you want out of the box really. The one thing you should watch for is the cooler and power configuration.
Ryan could you tell us what
Ryan could you tell us what the idle temps were for these cards? Just to see comparison/jump to load temps.
Sure, I’ll try to get these
Sure, I'll try to get these for you.
Correct me if I’m wrong Ryan,
Correct me if I’m wrong Ryan, but don’t these benchmarks basically show that the 660 ti is somewhat bottle necked by the memory bandwidth?
Correct. And we thought as
Correct. And we thought as much with the drop to a 192-bit memory bus width.
Honestly knowing the memory
Honestly knowing the memory situation, I recommend the card with the highest quality memory that can be overclocked because that alone is the performance boost for this card….I swear I read a review of a 660ti with some special memory chips…I dunno
Haven’t seen any like that
Haven't seen any like that yet…
Oh yea and Kudos to Zotec
Oh yea and Kudos to Zotec with the shorter card! Good for smaller cases.
I ordered the Zotac card
I ordered the Zotac card early (19th) since I have an SFF system and the Zotac card would be the only one to fit it.
I havent recieved it yet, but thank you for reassuring me that it was a good choise.
I have seen some sites claiming that zotac has a GTX 660 Ti Extreme edition in the making. While some say this is only intended for the chinese market, do you have any info on this and perhaps more specifics, like the size, of that card?
Haven’t heard anything yet,
Haven't heard anything yet, sorry.
Great read Ryan.
It is
Great read Ryan.
It is interesting to see just how much Kepler is affected by memory bandwidth and memory type.
Though we are seeing the downsides to GK104 being spread out as a entire product range, since GK104 was “meant” to be mid-range from the start. While the GTX 680/690/670/660 TI are great cards, they still dont target the “sweet spot” in my opinion, which is in the $150 – $250 ranges (aka cards like GTX 460/560 TI/ect).
#Side note: Do you need any more good reviewers/podcasters ;), lol.
I was able to overcloxk a
I was able to overcloxk a stock 660 ti to within 10% of the speed and bandwidth of a GTX 670, which is realy great imho. The temps were below 75*C.
Yup I got my O.C. to
Yup I got my O.C. to 1038/1103/1815 w/a temp at 78*C max.
The card is a EVGA 660ti.
The card is a EVGA 660ti. Overclock the memory and you can overcome the bandwidth restriction. Then the $299 card becomes a real value especialy w/the Borderlands game included.
Agreed, the $50-60 value of
Agreed, the $50-60 value of the game is pretty enticing considering it is just a current and big name title.
It will be interesting to
It will be interesting to hear MSI’s reason for the 114% Power cap. Could it be intentional to keep the Power Edition 660 Ti from overclocking as high as the more expensive Lightening edition?
The gpu temperatures dont are
The gpu temperatures dont are rigthes
i have a msi 660 ti oc and my gpu temperatues all all times higths thand yours .
got my msi 660ti to 1145/1223
got my msi 660ti to 1145/1223 and the memory to 1727mhz resulting in just about 7000mhz with afterburner,3dmark11 standard run P 8735 with those settings P 9237.
pretty good,but the memory bandwith just sucks,metro 2033 on high settings and 4xMsaa and 16xaf i cant get more than 30fps-35fps often dropping below that in intense scenes.
do yourself a favour and spend extra for a gtx 670 as you can run even very high settings and still preform better than a 660ti,and i play only on a 1920×1080 screen.a recent test revealed that even a AMD 7750 performs better with msaa and af settings put to max due to the memory bandwith.
I just purchased 2 EVGA GTX
I just purchased 2 EVGA GTX 660 TI SC+ 3GB and they are only hitting 60C under load. I’m not sure if something was changed in the 3GB version or if I just have a good card.