It’s 2019 and it’s only fitting we get a new flagship GPU to beef up our rigs. This new flagship comes in the form of NVIDIA’s GTX 1660Ti – that’s right, we’ve broken through into 16-series territory. NVIDIA claims that the GTX 1660Ti is an affordable GPU that boasts top-of-the-line performance.
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According to Nvidia Product Manager Justin Walker, the reasoning behind the graphics card’s naming is because it’s supposed to boast performance levels that fall between the GTX 10-series and RTX 20-series family of cards. So, NVIDIA claims that the GTX 1660Ti mirrors the performance of the GTX 1070 8GB in terms of performance.
This power is achieved thanks to the usage of Nvidia’s new Turing architecture, which can be found in the RTX; but unlike the RTX, this GPU does not support ray-tracing. According to Nvidia head engineer Tom Petersen, the new Turing architecture allows for concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations – when comparing to the older Pascal architecture’s one-at-a-time method. By doing this, Turing is effectively faster and more efficient than its predecessor – hence the comparison to the GTX 1070 8GB.
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The GTX 1660Ti comes with 1,536 CUDA cores with 12nm FinFET technology. Adaptive shading is also a new addition to the card – its programming will do a better job at prioritizing key graphical areas in a scene and shade accordingly. This allows for 40% less shading but still maintains the same quality.
So what does this all mean? Turing, with all its new features, is reportedly able to run Wolfenstein 2 at 117 fps, while the GTX1060 6GB could do only 70FPS. With the aforementioned concurrent float point execution method, Nvidia claims that Shadow of The Tomb Raider runs at 55 average fps with it, while the older method yields a 36 fps performance.
The GTX 1660Ti only comes in one 6GB VRAM variant and it boasts GDDR6 memory. The card retails at $279 (RM1,138) which is a whole RM1,000 cheaper than a GTX 1070Ti. The card will be available at partnered distributors only, so don’t expect a Founders Edition.