Borderlands 2 bundled with GeForce GTX 660 Ti, Nvidia's cheapest Kepler card yet
Borderlands 2 will accompany Nvidia's latest graphics card, the GeForce GTX 660 Ti, as a PhysX-enabled freebie in the US and Europe. The bundle should be shipping to stores today in multiple SKUs, and the included code will enable a free download of the game when it's released on September 18 (September 21 in Europe). Prices may vary between Nvidia's manufacturing partners, but the GTX 660 Ti is meant to hover around $300 – a hundred bucks below the more powerful GTX 670.
The GTX 660 Ti shoots for a sweet(er) spot between affordability and Nvidia's Kepler architecture, which has been praised for its brutish performance and energy efficiency. The company claims the 660 Ti trumps ATi's $350 Radeon HD 7950, and outperforms the GeForce GTX 560 Ti by 41 percent. It runs at a base speed of 915 MHz (boosting up to 980 MHz), carries 2GB of GDDR5 RAM and probably emits a mighty fine whirr.
Kepler also makes a case for TXAA (Temporal Approximate Anti-Aliasing), a rendering technique that examines visual output and then attempts to predict and compensate for jagged edges in upcoming frames. According to Nvidia, TXAA is superior when it comes to producing anti-aliasing for scenes in motion. The first game to make use of TXAA is Funcom's new flagship MMO, The Secret World (demonstrated after the break.)
Nvidia didn't announce TXAA support for Borderlands 2, but did peg the cel-shaded shooter's maxed-settings performance on the 660 Ti at an average of 78 frames per second, on a high-end rig and a resolution of 1080p. The video above highlights the physics-driven flair added by PhysX, though not nearly as well as the insightful quote from Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, which we've taken verbatim from the press materials: "you can get some crazy awesome physics simulations."
