Crysis: Warhead - The GeForce GTX 660 Ti Review, Feat. EVGA, Zotac, and Gigabyte

Crysis: Warhead

Kicking things off as always is Crysis: Warhead. It’s no longer the toughest game in our benchmark suite, but it’s still a technically complex game that has proven to be a very consistent benchmark. Thus even four years since the release of the original Crysis, “but can it run Crysis?” is still an important question, and the answer continues to be “no.” While we’re closer than ever, full Enthusiast settings at a 60fps is still beyond the grasp of a single-GPU card.

For a $300 performance card the most important resolution is typically going to be 1920x1080/1200, however in some cases these cards should be able to cover 2560x1440/1600 at a reasonable framerate. To that end, we’ll be focusing on 1920x1200 for the bulk of our review.

Crysis has been a sore spot for NVIDIA since the launch of Kepler, and GTX 660 Ti doesn’t improve this. Since it’s a memory bandwidth constrained game and GTX 660 Ti takes away 25% of GK104’s memory bandwidth, the result is a predictable drop in performance.  The GTX 660 Ti only reaches 80% of the GTX 670’s performance here, which is only a bit more than our worst case scenario of 75%. At 38.8fps it’s playable, but it’s definitely not a great experience. So for anyone wanting to partake in this classic, an AMD card is the way to go and it doesn’t matter which; even the 7870 is marginally faster.

As for our factory overclocked cards from Zotac, EVGA, and Gigabyte, while they improve the situation they don’t do so by a great deal. Unexpectedly, despite its memory bandwidth advantage the Gigabyte card actually edges out the Zotac card here, due to the former’s higher power target allowing it to boost to higher clockspeeds. Still that’s only a 4% improvement, far below what these kinds of overclocks are really capable of hitting.

Looking at minimum framerates is even more grim; the GTX 660 Ti is experiencing its worst case scenario. Crysis, Kepler, and low memory bandwidth are a very bad combination here. As for the factory overclocked cards, the Zotac card finally takes the lead thanks to its memory overclock, but like our average framerates in Crysis it’s not a particularly big jump.

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