Promoting the penetration of distributed photovoltaic systems (PV) at the end-user side is an important and urgent task. This study aims to evaluate the promotion impact of the response capability of smart home consumers on the distributed PV penetration using non-cooperative game theoretical analysis. In the analysis, the Nash equilibrium can be found for consumers with different levels of demand response capability in an electricity market with real-time pricing (RTP) mechanism under different PV installed capacities and battery capacities. As a case study, 5 levels of consumers' response capability, 32 combinations of PV installed capacities and battery capacities were analyzed and inter-compared using the developed model. The results show that: (i) the consumers with higher response capability are able to accept larger PV capacity because the marginal revenue of new installed PV for smart consumers decreases much more slowly compared to that of a common consumer; (ii) the consumers with higher response capability need less batteries to promote PV economic acceptability; (iii) the consumers with higher response capability can meet the electricity demand in real-time with least expenditure, so they get more ultimate benefit from the games. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.