So my brother (as well as me eventually as I will likely buy one of these two later on, but I'm in no need of buying a new GPU right now) is in need of a new GPU, as his faithful 5770 has served its course.
What he's looking to achieve with this upgrade is a smooth gaming experience at maximum settings on most games at 1920x1080/1200p, particulary for the release of Crysis 3 among other demanding game titles.
Now, the current contestants are the Gigabyte 660 OC and Gigabyte 660 ti OC, both due to their pricing and performance compared to the rest of the 660s/ti's. I've considered suggesting him to get a 7950 because of their fantastic overclocking headroom. However, as he's planning on going SLI/Crossfire-mode later on, a GPU from AMD might not be the best pick when taking their driver support history for Crossfire into consideration, not to mention the microstuttering with AMD GPUs in Crossfire in particular. Glad to see that they're fixing their frame latency with single GPUs though.
Nvidia on the other hand seem to have completely eliminated micro suttering with their 660 series from what I've read and seen. There's a chance that AMD might shape up and start patching things up, but he'd rather have a new GPU within the very near future rather than later it seems.
The burning question I've been unable to answer though is if a single overclocked 660 (in addition to the factory overclock I might add) can max out Crysis 3 @ 1920x1080/1200 with a steady 35-40ish fps, and that seems to be the deciding factor between the two. The difference in price between a non-ti and a ti in Sweden is approximately 35-40% while "only" offering up to 10-15% more performance in most games.
Would a fair assumption be that the ti runs at 40ish fps on average with all settings cranked up to ultra at x1080, given that Crysis 2 runs at about 50 fps on a 660 ti with DX11/Highres pack and x1080? If so, that would mean the the non-ti runs at about 35 fps. Would the difference even be smaller perhaps? (Of course I'm just pulling numbers out of my rear end, but eh, speculation doesn't hurt)
Then again, would that really justify gap in price between the two?