NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti vs AMD Radeon RX Vega 7

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 Ti is a high-end desktop graphics card based on the GK104 Kepler chip. It supports DirectX 11 and is manufactured in 28nm at TSMC. The core clock can be up to 980 MHz under load (GeForce Boost) and is a tleast 915 MHz. The GDDR5 VRAM is usually clocked at 1500 MHz (6000 MHz effective data rate).

Due to the higher core clock speed, the performance of the desktop GTX 660Ti is above the mobile GTX 680M (altough the 680M offers a wider memory bus of 256 Bit). Demanding games of 2013 should run in 1920x1080 with maximum settings and 4x Antialiasing fluently. Only Company of Heroes 2 and Hitman: Absolution scored below 30fps in our benchmarks on the average.

The chip offers the 5th generation video processor VP5, which is able to decode MPEG-1, 2, 4, H.264, VC1/WMV9 with a resolution of up to 4K. Furthermore, the included vidoe encoder called NVENC is able to encode H.264 vidoes without stressing the CPU.

The Geforce GTX 660Ti is rated at 150 Watt TDP and the default design uses two 6-pin power connectors.

Beware: For our benchmarks we used a slightly overclocked version that ran with 980-1059 MHz compared to the default 915 - 980 MHz. 

AMD Radeon RX Vega 7

The AMD Radeon RX Vega 7 is an integrated GPU for notebooks. It is used in the Ryzen 4000 and Ryzen 5000 mobile APUs. The GPU is based on the Vega architecture (5th generation GCN) and has 7 CUs (= 448 shaders) clocked at up to 1,800 MHz. The iGPU's performance depends on the TDP of an APU (15, 35, 45 W or cTDP), the clocks, the cooling, and the memory configuration). The GPU should benefit from fast dual-channel DDR4-3200 RAM (contrary to DDR4-2133 single-channel, which is also possible).

The Vega architecture offers some improvements over the Polaris generation and now supports DirectX 12 Feature Level 12_1. More information is available in our dedicated article about the Raven Ridge architecture.

The performance should be slightly lower than the older RX Vega 8 GPU (1 CU more, but lower clock speed). That means, only some demanding games of 2019 will run in lowest detail settings. Less demanding games like Fifa 20 or Dirt Rally 2.0 should run in higher settings and 1920 x 1080.

Thanks to the 7 nm process and clever power-saving features, the power consumption is comparatively low (according to AMD), so the iGPU won't look out of place in a slimmer, lighter laptop.