GTX: 580 or 660Ti?

#1

I’ve heard a lot of bad things about the Kepler cards - being limited by the drivers and stuff like that. The thing is though, they’ve much more VRAM than standard issue Fermis within the same price range.

   If you had to choose between a GTX580 with 1.5 gigs and the new GTX660 Ti with 3 gigs or VRAM, what would you folks pick? I mean - as a 3D generalists, a card for doing home, personal experiments in Houdini, 3D Coat, Maya. What would you pick? Top card based on Fermi or a medium-level card based on Kepler?
   I've read TONS of stuff about those cards all over the Internet. Stuff like 580 having wider memory bus, 660 having more CUDA cores, blah blah.

   Honestly, I'm getting sick of those comparisons and benchmarks. Especially when results differ between the sites. Some claim Fermi's almost equal to Kepler, some claim Kepler eats Fermi on breakfast (still speaking about 580 vs 660Ti here). Now, I understand benchmark guys test their cards only against computer games and have no clue how would they perform in 3D apps. That's why I hope you guys will come for a rescue here.
 
 I'd buy Radeon instead of an nVidia card, but I still have Sentry66's rants about HD7950 ringing in my ears.
 
 Oh, and one more thing. My card I'm upgrading from is 9800GTX with 512MB VRAM. Pretty old one. Gives me a headache during texturing in 3D Coat.
#2

i can for certain, that having more CUDA cores will not be a benefit… at all.

for texturing, i would look at whichever one fits your budget and offers the most video ram for what you are doing…

i too had a 9800 GTX w/ 512MB ram and worked in Mudbox… it was terrible.

#3

A) For Mari and Mudbox video ram is practically everything for the biggest stretch of the work you do in them. I’d take a 4xx with 12GB over an 8xx from the future with 3.

B) The 5xx series was pretty dismal, I’m glad I could try test models because it would have been a waste of money. I’m currently running on a 670 (or 80, can’t remember right now), and my girlfriend is on a 660, and we’re both overall pretty happy with the experience.

C) 6xx is sort of a “coming back to glory” in some regards. Not on all fronts, but it’s generally a better liked generation than 5xx.

So, yeah, definitely the 660.

#4

Thank you guys. This was very informative.
I ordered the GTX660Ti 3GB today. Can’t wait to see the difference when compared to my oldie.

#5

i guarantee that you will kick yourself for not doing it sooner…

#6

the 6 series also generate less heat and are better on power consumption than the 5 series.
The keplers at last support 4 monitors, something ati has been doing for a few years now.

#7

i guarantee that you will kick yourself for not doing it sooner…

 So, the brand new Gigabyte's GTX660Ti 3GB finally arrived a couple of days ago and I had some time to test it - mostly in 3D Coat. While my 9800GTX performed at mere 1fps on a 18 million tris voxel scene, the GTX660Ti is doing at almost 40fps. Cinebench R11.5 OpenGL result: 51.97 (3930K).
 I must say I am very, very satisfied with the purchase and I still keep kickin' my bacon even while writing these words. :bounce:
#8

excellent to know, thanks for updating us! :beer:

#9

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