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 bus width and memory remain the same on both the

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