Evga Geforce Gtx 1660 Super Review And Benchmarks
It is only the GeForce that is arriving on store shelves today, however. The GeForce GTX 1650 Super will be arriving at little later in November. NVIDIA is introducing some new driver and GeForce Experience-related features today too, which we will cover in a just bit.
There are also new technologies accessible to the Turing architecture, such as adaptive shading, which maintain fidelity while reducing GPU load. And Nvidia is also adding driver-level image sharpening to the mix with the latest drivers too. We’ve covered the Nvidia Turing architecture in depth elsewhere, but suffice to say that even in this GTX guise, the Turing shaders offer a lot more than the previous Pascal generation of GPUs. The concurrent execution of integer and floating point calculations increases the overall performance of the shaders themselves and the unified cache architecture boosts the chip’s throughput too.
Resident Evil 2 shows almost no performance uplift for the 1660 Super over the standard 1660, just a ~2% increase for the average frame rate. In other words, it’s the exact same 12nm 284mm2 die comprised of 6.6 billion transistors. It also has a 6GB VRAM buffer, but it’s here where the changes have been made. Nvidia has upgraded the 8 Gb/s GDDR5 memory of the standard 1660 to 14 Gb/s GDDR6 memory and this sees a massive 75% increase in memory bandwidth. In fact, this provides the 1660 Super with even more memory bandwidth than the Ti model.
Now that they’ve effectively undone this – and then some – most of the performance that NVIDIA shaved off for the GTX 1660 has come back in the lower-priced Super card. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a TH graphics card review that had such few cards being compared. Leaving out the 1660 non-super seems odd, as does the lack of RX 590 .
Instead of spending an extra $20-$50 on better cooling and a higher factory overclock, it’s better to just move up to the next performance tier—the GTX 1660 Ti in this case. The downside is that the card isn’t particularly quiet, measuring 60 dB under load from a distance of 5cm, but that keeps the GPU at a relatively chill maximum core temperature of 74C. I’m not saying the card is bad by any means, but it ends up overlapping the GTX 1660 Ti in many respects. It still has the GPU core counts and clockspeeds of the vanilla GTX 1660, but now it gets GDDR6 memory—which was one of the primary differentiators between the 1660 and 1660 Ti. Even more curious, the GDDR6 memory is clocked at 14Gbps compared to the 12Gbps speed on the 1660 Ti. Basically, it’s weird to have a lower tier card that’s both better and worse than an existing higher tier card.
That boosts performance a few percent in practice, and while you wouldn’t normally notice the difference while playing games, it will certainly show up in the benchmarks. Earlier this year, Nvidia launched its new GTX 16-series with the GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1660, and GTX 1650 seeking to join the ranks of the best graphics cards. The lack of ray tracing hardware is an interesting change after last years RTX 20-series, but it does make sense for the mid-range and lower markets. When Nvidia refreshed the RTX lineup with the Super models, I didn’t expect to see that extend into the GTX range, yet here we are. The gtx 1080 8gb is a thing that now exists, leveraging the same Turing architecture and TU116 GPU, but it certainly leaves me scratching my head.
On hand we have two GTX 1660 Super models, the MSI Gaming X and Gigabyte Gaming OC, and both deliver the exact same performance, typically operating at 1965 MHz. The MSI Gaming X peaked at 63 C in our F stress test and with a fan speed of 1700 RPM it was very quiet. The Gigabyte Gaming OC ran 1 degree cooler for the most part, though it did peak at 65 C now and then, the fans also spun 100 RPM faster though both cards were overall very quiet when gaming. Increasing the MSRP by just $10 over the base model seems like a pretty good deal as that’s just a 4% price hike for a 75% increase in memory bandwidth which should more often than not, result in double digit performance gains. But still, the fact it’s sometimes that close does highlight just what sort of gaming performance you can get out of this $230 GPU.
Left on its own the card ran at 1,890MHz and a maximum temperature of 73C. This powerful photo mode lets you take professional-grade screenshots of your games like never before. Now, you can share your most brilliant gaming experiences with super-resolution, 360-degree, HDR, and stereo capture modes.
And yet the GTX 1660 Super is still delivering higher gaming performance than its predecessor, and that might just make it the best mainstream graphics card around. The GeForce 16 series is based on the same Turing architecture used in the GeForce 20 series, omitting the Tensor and RT cores exclusive to the 20 series. The 16 series does, however, retain the dedicated integer cores used for concurrent execution of integer and floating point operations. GeForce GTX® 16 SUPER™ Series features a dedicated hardware encoder that unlocks the ability to game and stream simultaneously with superior quality. SUPER graphics cards are optimized for your favorite streaming apps to provide maximum performance for your live stream. This graphics card supports NVIDIA® G-SYNCTM display technology for a super-smooth variable refresh rate experience.
To match the value of the RX 590, the new gigabyte gtx 1060 3gb may need to deliver 1660 Ti-like performance. For those of you not keeping tabs, we now have the GTX 1660 for $220, the GTX 1660 Ti for $280, the RTX 2060 for $350 and the RTX 2060 Super for $400. In the price range between $200 and $400 there were already 4 GeForce options, but as of today we now have 6. The GTX 1660 Super slots in at $230 and there’s also the 1650 Super coming next month, no word on pricing yet. It’s only the Assassin’s Creed and Total War benchmarks where there’s very little between them, elsewhere at 1080p you’re looking at between 10 – 21% higher frame rates from the GTX 1660 Super. There are even a few occasions where the Super actually polls higher than the Ti card, though only ever by a few frames here and there, and generally never more than potential testing variance either.