Advice about GPU upgrade

[macschwag14]

Hi. I'm in a GPU upgrade dilemma and looking for advice.

I'm able to buy a new Zotac GeForce GTX 660 Ti ZT-60802-10P for $180. I currently have an EVGA 012-P3-2066-KR GeForce GTX 560 Ti 448 Cores FTW card. It works great (though it puts out some serious heat), but I run all my games at 2560x1440.

Unreal Engine 3 games can run on ultra with AA and MSAA turned off, and many non-UE3 games can run on high with the same things turned off. I get about 30-40 fps with these settings. For BioShock Infinite I had to turn many settings to medium, though.

My question is, since I'm running such a high resolution, is the Zotac a good investment for the price and will I see a noticeable improvement with the extra memory (2GB vs 1.2GB), speed and Keplar architecture?

Thanks!

 

[Revdarian]

http://www.ocaholic.ch/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=991&page=2

http://www.techspot.com/review/655-bioshock-infinite-performance/page4.html >>directly a 1440p comparison.
I would say that yeah, it will be quite the performance boost as in the direct comparison it was a 84% increment.

Well if you don't plan to use MSAA i don't really see such an issue with 2gb vs 3gb to be honest, someone else might want to chime in taking into account that you don't mind the lack of MSAA.

BTW If you aren't already, you should look at SweetFX for your non MSAA AA requirements, i will leave you a link over here:
http://www.guru3d.com/files_details/sweetfx_shader_suite_download.html

It uses SMAA which is a shader based AA that is better quality and speed than FXAA and MLAA (it is actually an upgraded version of MLAA).

 

[dragonstongue]

FXAA is supposed to be a bridge between SSAA and MSAA in that it is a post process and generally only taps the things that would normally be aliased from the start, so it tends to be less resource hungry, results vary, it does do the whole image but there is a reason why its called "fast approximate"
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/126371-13-crysis-beta-smaa-txaa-fxaa-msaa

good discussions here about the different types.

The 2gb vs 3gb does not matter all that much for the 6 series, they have redesigned the memory pipeline if you will so it is more efficient and can make use of the bandwidth it is given, If you are running very high resolutions(or tex mods) with sick amounts of eye candy then you might need the extra memory but beyond this, it makes little to no difference, another exception might be with SLI but again the difference seems to be small at best if not Vram limiting ~3-9% pushed to the very edge of what they can do period.

We just had a "discussion" about this the other day and a lad forget his name was quite adamant that the 560 448core was better then 660Ti even a power edition(one of the best versions)
Depends on how much if any you have the OC to, there is somewhere in the 5-10% performance boost overall, with less power, temps, and noise of course which is always good.