Turing Goes Mainstream: First Peek at Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1660 Ti

Today, Nvidia (or more accurately, its card partners) dropped its latest graphics cards based on the Turing architecture, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti family.

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is Nvidia's attempt to bridge the gap between gamers who are still on GeForce 9XX (or AMD Radeon RX 400-series) cards but still don't want to drop the significant chunk of change they'd need to break into the premium-level GeForce RTX line.

Cards in the GeForce RTX family start at $349, in various GeForce RTX 2060 cards from Nvidia itself and its board partners. (See, for example, our review of the Zotac GeForce RTX 2060 Amp.) The new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti cards start at $279 in reference-card form.

The main idea behind the launch of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti? Nvidia is offering all the improvements that came with the development of Nvidia's "Turing" (the architecture upon which the GeForce RTX series is also based) without saddling the card with the pricier extras—notably, the deep-learning and ray-tracing cores—that add to the costs associated with RTX cards.

In essence, the card is a bridge between the RTX line and the older "Pascal" cards that have dominated the mainstream market for the past several years.

GeForce GTX 1660 Ti: A Peek at the Core Specs

What's the core of this new family? The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti will come stock with 1,536 CUDA cores, 96 texture units, 48 ROP units, a base clock of 1,500MHz, a boost clock of 1,770MHz, and 6GB of 6,000MHz GDDR6 memory. The GTX 1660 Ti will be capable of pushing 11 teraflops over its 192-bit memory interface, thanks in part to its 6.6 billion transistor count.

Here's a look at those core specs and more, versus its rough equivalent in the Nvidia Pascal family, the GeForce GTX 1060...

As for outputs, the reference version of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti will come with one DisplayPort 1.4, one dual-link DVI, and one HDMI port (no confirmation so far on whether this is 2.0 or the newer 2.1 interface). The partner versions of the GTX 1660 Ti that we are privy to so far have either one each of DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort, or three DisplayPorts and one HDMI. The port loadout, though, doesn't look to necessarily correspond to the size of the card; all of the GTX 1660 Ti cards we have seen so far look like two-slot thicknesses, regardless.

As for the card's power requirements, the reference design of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti requires one eight-pin power cable, and Nvidia recommends having at least a 400-watt power supply installed in your PC to run it. We should see cards from partners including Asus, EVGA, MSI, Zotac, PNY, Gainward, Palit, and Gigabyte.

Note that this is a partner-cards-only launch; Nvidia did create a reference design for the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti for its board makers to follow, but it is not selling GTX 1660 Ti cards itself, nor a Founders Edition version, unlike with its GeForce RTX line.

The Speed Potential

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is meant to bring more-affordable, high-refresh gaming to the masses, and Nvidia claims that many of the most popular online gaming titles, such as Fortnite and Apex Legends, should have no problem maintaining 120 frames per second or higher at 1080p using the appropriate setting recommendations. That said, AAA titles released in the past few years will likely struggle at higher resolutions at those games' top quality settings, but that's to be expected for any card released in the sub-$300 price bracket, Nvidia or otherwise.

The card also features an enhanced NVEC processor that will enhance the quality of your game streams on platforms like Twitch, removing the requirement for a gaming PC attached to a separate streaming PC to maintain optimum throughput. Given the target audience of online gamers playing only semi-demanding titles who tend to stream, this could be a big difference-maker for some of those folks.

Nvidia claims gamers should expect about 1.5 times the performance found on the previous-generation GeForce GTX 1060 (the 6GB version of that card), and up to three times the performance of the card going one generation back before that, the GeForce GTX 960.

As noted, GeForce GTX 1660 Ti cards should debut at $279 MSRP for reference versions. Expect prices slightly higher for models with factory overclocks or enhanced coolers. (MSI's hopped-up GeForce RTX 1660 Ti Gaming Z, for one, will sport a $309 MSRP.) Most of the third-party models we saw in our presser look to be on the stout side, but with roughly a third of the cards sporting only a single fan on their modestly sized cooling bricks.

Will the Pricing Hold?

As for that pricing: Whether or not this $279 starting price for reference-design boards is commonly seen on the market at launch remains to be seen. However, it would seem competitor AMD believes it will, as the company announced yesterday a temporary sale price for its reference-version MSI Radeon RX Vega 56 card to $279 on Newegg, ostensibly to compete with the release of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. (As of this morning, though, other RX Vega 56 cards were still in the $400-to-$500 range, and that MSI card was out of stock.)

Here at PCMag, we are just getting our first third-party GeForce GTX 1660 Ti cards in-house, and in the coming days we plan to be putting them all through their paces to verify the benchmarks versus previous cards in the GTX family, as well as to see how the GTX 1660 Ti holds up against cards like the Vega 56 in head-to-head tests. Stay tuned!