Nvidia Releases Gtx 1660 Super And Its Good!
On Tuesday, Nvidia Super-fied its GeForce GTX 16-series graphics cards, with the mass-market upgrade following in the footsteps of its beefier RTX Super siblings—and running defense against AMD’s impending Radeon RX 5500 series. The GeForce GTX 1660 Super launches today (we’ve already reviewed it), bolstered by some killer new software features in GeForce Experience, and a GTX 1650 Super is waiting in the wings in November. This is probably the most ubiquitous benchmark, part of Passmark PerformanceTest suite. It gives the graphics card a thorough evaluation under various load, providing four separate benchmarks for Direct3D versions 9, 10, 11 and 12 , and few more tests engaging DirectCompute capabilities. 3DMark Vantage is an outdated DirectX 10 benchmark using 1280×1024 screen resolution. It taxes the graphics card with two scenes, one depicting a girl escaping some militarized base located within a sea cave, the other displaying a space fleet attack on a defenseless planet.
That card shipped with slightly slower 12Gbps GDDR6, giving the GTX 1660 Super a bandwidth advantage that further erodes the small lead that the GTX 1660 Ti holds on to. Competing AMD cards are also missing from these charts, in part because it’s an odd time for mainstream GPUs from Team Red. But we still don’t have a release date or pricing for the RX 5500—and we obviously don’t have test results.
And yet the gtx 1080 8gb 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.
That was until later in the year when the Radeon RX 590 dropped from around $300 to nearly $200. By slashing prices AMD has managed to remain relevant in the budget and mainstream GPU market with their older RX 500 series GPUs, and in fact managed to become the go to option below $200. The $200 RX 590 is no doubt going to be thorn in the $230 GTX 1660 Super’s side.
Currently, NVIDIA doesn’t face any big competition from AMD Navi GPUs in these segments but Polaris lives on to be one of the best selling lineups due to various price cuts and promotions by retailers around the globe. Nvidia won’t release its own Founders Edition graphics cards for the new GTX 16-series Super GPUs. Instead, you’ll find custom models by board partners like Asus, EVGA, and Gigabyte on store shelves. As a reminder, the GTX 16-series GPUs donot include dedicated real-time ray tracing hardware like their Turing GPU-based siblings, the pricier GeForce RTX 20-series.
And in case you were wondering, this support will also extend to Turing-based, non-RTX cards like the GeForce GTX 1660 and GeForce GTX 1660 Ti . There was between 10-15% between the GTX 1660 and GTX GB too – again Nvidia was right on the money here. Nvidia’s claimed boost over the GTX GB was spot on here with a 15% advantage in minimum frame rate courtesy of the GTX 1660. Another relatively easy game to run if you have a mid-range graphics card, AMD’s RX 590 was particularly strong here, bettering even the GTX 1660 Ti. The latter wasn’t that much quicker than the GTX 1660 either, with the lower three Nvidia cards bunching up at the bottom of the graph. 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.
These parameters indirectly speak of performance, but for precise assessment you have to consider their benchmark and gaming test results. Note that power consumption of some gtx 1080 8gb graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked. GeForce GTX SUPER Series graphics cards are powered by the NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture.
Normally you’d see higher-spec video RAM tied to a faster GPU, so you’d be left a little unsure as to whether the performance hikes you were seeing were down to the improved graphics silicon or if it was down to the memory. As we’ve said, the actual GPU at the heart of the gtx 1090 hasn’t changed from the standard GTX 1660. It’s the exact same TU116 GPU, with 22 streaming multiprocessors and 1,408 CUDA cores. It’s even running at the same base and boost clock frequencies too. So the only thing that’s giving it the serious performance uplift shown by our benchmarking tests is that boosted video memory subsystem.