Nvidia Geforce Gtx 1660 Arrives To Fill An Entry Gaming Desktop Slot
But the Radeon’s appeal is on pricing and that will determine which way you should go. If Nvidia does offer the 1660 Super at $230 then we’d purchase it over a $200 RX 590 and that was probably their intention all along. At the intended $230 MSRP, the gtx 1080 8gb Super would cost just 2% more per frame than the RX 590 and that makes it the better choice given the greatly reduced power consumption. At $240 it may still be the right choice for most, but anything more than that and you could argue strongly for the RX 590 at $200.
First up we have Shadow of the Tomb Raider and here the new 1660 Super was 4% faster than the base model. Not exactly an exciting result but it was significantly faster than the RX 590, so there’s that. In other words, it’s the exact same 12nm 284mm2 die comprised of 6.6 billion transistors.
However, due to its inflated price tag it’s just too close to Ti territory to make it a must-buy. As far as the GPU itself goes, it shares a lot of the same features as the GTX 1660 Ti, just trimmed down a smidge to hit a lower price point. The main differences between the 1660 and the Ti version are pretty apparent; less CUDA cores, and slower memory, but they both have the same 120w TDP and run at roughly the same clock speeds. Considering it costs about $100 less, that’s not too shabby of a tradeoff really.
The GTX 1660 Ti performed excellently and was well ahead of the RX 590, leaving the GTX 1660 snapping at the AMD card’s heels. Still a popular free-to-play MMO, World of Tanks isn’t particularly taxing, but you still see big increases in frame rates with the new Core graphics engine as you rise up the GPU scale. At 1,920 x 1,080, the GTX 1060 has the measure of the RX 590 and adds 14% to the minimum and 10% to the average frame rates of the GTX GB. Clearly not a worthwhile upgrade – you’d need to step up to the GTX 1660 Ti for that. At 1440p, the GTX 1660 switched places with the RX 590, but was still getting on for 10% quicker than the GTX GB in maintaining a minimum frame rate of 67fps.
With faster memory, it is much closer in performance to the 1660 Ti than its other specifications might suggest. In fact, even a $180/£160 GTX GB doesn’t make much sense when for an extra $40/£40, you’re getting up to 30% more performance. It’s a good time for the consumer then as we’re likely going to see cut-price Pascal cards, but as it stands the GTX 1660 is definitely worth the cash and if you’re a 1080p gamer, it offers plenty of headroom too. Both cards look set to retail at similar prices once the GTX 1660 hits the shelves. Overall the Nvidia card is faster, but there are some titles where the difference is negligible and others where the AMD card is faster.
We mentioned this a couple of times before, but initially, when the first rumors on the GeForce GTX surfaced, speculation was everywhere and we had doubts NVIDIA would actually release a new GTX while moving forward towards it’s RTX branding. But yes, NVIDIA is now injecting a Turing based GPU into the mainstream called TU116. To make it more affordable NVIDIA stripped away the RTX and DLSS features, that means there are no RT and Tensor cores on this GPU.
The GTX 1660 Super is typically within only a few frames per second of the 1660 Ti, making it arguably the most competitive buy among the 1660s. Components that offer the best value for money have great performance and a low price . The smaller the overlap between the yellow and green bars, the better the value for money. Each memory controller is associated with eight ROPs and a 256KB slice of L2 cache. GeForce GTX 1660’s ROP count compares favorably to RTX 2060, which also utilizes 48 render outputs. Six 32-bit memory controllers give TU116 an aggregate 192-bit bus, which is populated by 8 Gb/s GDDR5 modules that push up to 192 GB/s.
It’s about 12 percent faster than the outgoing GTX GB, so nothing major, but at least it’s both faster and less expensive. It’s also 20 percent faster than the GB, 35 percent faster than a GTX 970, and over twice as fast as a GTX 1050. Note that when the 1050 came out, performance was also nearly identical to the GTX 960 2GB, so if you’re holding onto an older GPU there’s definitely potential for a good performance boost.
Solid performance gains can also be seen when testing with Sniper Elite 4, the 1660 Super was 14% faster than the base model and just 4% slower than the Ti model, so another excellent result. Nvidia did claim up to 20% performance gains and we have our first example of that here with Monster Hunter gigabyte gtx 1060 3gb World. The 1660 Super was good for 67 fps on average and that makes it 20% faster than the standard 1660 and just 7% slower than the 1660 Ti. We see another solid performance uplift, this time when testing with Battlefield V. A 13% increase over the base model is the best result we’ve seen yet.