Final Thoughts

It's hard to fault NVIDIA's upcoming GEFORCE GTX 660 Ti and for good reason. You're talking about a video card that is rumored to hit at the mid-$200 range yet performs like a video card priced $100 more. In this case we're talking about the HD 7950 specifically. You could argue that it can be compared against the more expensive HD 7970 at times, too.

On the flaws side of things, the GTX 660 Ti is plagued with the same issue as all NVIDIA video cards. As soon as we move to 2560 x 1600, the lead it had, generally disappears. We're not sure if AMD is just really good at handling the higher resolution or NVIDIA is just not great at it. At this price point, though, you wouldn't expect a video card to handle 2560 x 1600; often it does, though.

There are also a few areas we haven't tested today like power, noise and heat. Due to reasons mentioned in the introduction, we've chosen to avoid those particular tests today, as they could help identify the supplier of the video card. Of course we'll be looking at all these numbers when we start to test retail based models that are set to arrive later this week. Out of respect to those partners, though, we won't be showing off the card until it officially launches later in the month and while we've got this card for roughly just another 24 hours before it has to go back to a certain companies R&D lab, we will be taking the time to see how the overclocking side of things go.

It's clear that NVIDIA had all intensions of shaking things up with this generation. Sure, they came out later then they would've hoped and NVIDIA has left this mid-$200 price bracket empty for what I feel is too long, but they're ready to hit it, and it seems like they're going to hit it extremely hard.

I suppose the best news for AMD is that since NVIDIA choose to be such a pain in the behind to us, they've got two weeks heads up on what to expect with this new part before it officially launches. The problem for AMD, though, is that while this card is priced at levels around the HD 7850 and HD 7870, its performance is around that of the HD 7950 and HD 7970. You combine this with the fact that AMD really don't have any more room to move on price due to recent price drops. We really do wonder what AMD can do. NVIDIA do this excellent job of taking on multiple AMD models with just one video card and in this case, we see that happening again.

The GTX 660 Ti is going to be a fantastic model and we can't wait to see what partners do with it. While we might not like how NVIDIA treat us, we don't let it ever get in the way of our judgment and today we can again see that NVIDIA have put together a great model that is surely set to be really popular based on what we've shown you here today.