NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Benchmarks: The AMD RX 590 Killer

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti started off as a rumor with many media outlets ignoring the leaks. With time though, it caught a good deal of momentum and it became certain that something was cooking in NVIDIA’s kitchen. Yesterday, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti was finally announced for a price point of $279, with performance roughly on par with the Pascal based GTX 1070. The 1660 Ti leverages the same Turing architecture as the RTX series, but loses the RTCores and Tensor cores in favor of sheer rendering performance.

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is meant for 1080p gaming at high frame rates, especially for eSports and the Battle Royale genre where the performance can affect the course of the matches. Other than that, this GTX Turing GPU is for gamers who are still stuck with the GTX 900 series or the entry-level 10-series cards and the RTX 2060 is out of their reach due to financial or any other reasons.

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is built from the ground up and is a completely new chip, named the TU116, instead of a cut-down RTX part. In terms of raw single precision performance, the GTX 1660 Ti sits between the GTX 1060 and the GTX 1070, but the real world performance paints a different story altogether where the architectural improvements propel the 1660 Ti ahead of the 1070 in most games.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti: Specs

Coming to the architecture, it’s the same ol’ Turing as the RTX 2060 except without the fancy raytracing and DLSS cores. The rest is quite identical with the SMs dropping from 30 on the 2060 to 24 to give a net CUDA core count of 1536 (the RTX 2060 has 1920). Although the memory is also clocked slightly lower, I’m pretty sure it can be easily overclocked to a significant degree, as already proved by our testing of the GDDR6 memory on the Turing cards.

The bus width and memory remain the same on both the GPUs, and unexpectedly the GTX 1660 Ti gets a higher core clock by almost 100MHz. The TDP comes down from 160W on the RTX 2060 to 120W on the 1660 Ti. Just in case you were wondering, SLI isn’t supported just like all the other mid-range GeForce cards and is reserved for x80 stack of GPUs, not that it actually works most of the time. Futhermore, no FE cards will be available for the 1660 Ti and you’re going to have to rely on NVIDIA’s board partners if you want one.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti benchmarks

Lets head straight to the benchmarks. Since this card isn’t meant for 4K, we’ll be looking at the QHD and FHD tests only:

Battlefield 1

Far Cry 5

Final Fantasy XV

Shadow of War

Wolfenstein II

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti performs almost identical to the GTX 1070 with the RTX 2060 being roughly 10-15% faster at both the resolutions. Going down the chart, we can see that the GTX 1060 is approx 40-45% slower than the latest Turing GPU while the much older GTX 960 either completely falls flat or is able to deliver only a third of the Ti’s performance. Now, that’s what I call a damn good budget card.

Conclusion

The GeForce 1660 Ti was a bit of an unexpected surprise despite tons of rumors, but it’s certainly is a welcome one. It performs on par with the now-retired GTX 1070 and comes within striking distance of the RTX 2060 once overclocked. It pretty much puts AMD’s Radeon RX 590 out of commission and despite being a bit more expensive is certainly a much better deal than the RX 580 as well.

Read more:

• Intel’s Iris Plus Graphics 940 iGPU Performance leaked, Faster than AMD Radeon Vega 10
• NVIDIA Lost Thousands of GPU Wafers, Courtesy of TSMC’s $550 Million Blunder
• AMD Claims Support for Real-Time Ray Tracing on all of its DX12 GPUs

Benchmark courtesy: Anandtech