I have been doing some modelling in Blender lately and unfortunately real-time rendering is quite slow with my 3770K because my current graphics card is AMD and therefore has no CUDA support (which Cycles needs for GPU rendering). Does anyone have experience with Cycles who can recommend a reasonably priced card? I was looking at the MSI 660 Ti OC for $300 but would it be worth stepping up to the next level? The 670 is another $100 on average so would the speed difference between a 660 Ti and 670 be worth the price?
im gonna say yes, i dont like the 660ti personally, as the only difference between the ti and 670 is the bus bandwidth, they both have the same amount of cuda cores but the 670 actually has the bus bandwidth to use all off them. i also personally feel that nvidia should have never done the ti cause really it's a missleading product. nvidia should have did with the ti what amd did with the tahiti le which is trim back the core count so that the ti actually had optimal cores to buswidth ratio like the tahiti le did. that way there's no baggage to pay for by the end consumer.
so bottom line: if you can afford a 670 get one, to be honest the 670 has always been rankend closely to the 680 not the 660ti and the 660ti ranks much closer to the 660 in performance. iv always seen the 660 and 670 to be the best bang for buck cards from the green team, the 660ti just seems pointless in my eyes and the 680 is just a iv got a more bit of cash to burn for a little bit more performance.