NVIDIA's today took the wraps off of its latest graphics card, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. And as the strange numbering scheme may suggest, the card strikes a middle-ground between the GTX 10-series cards of yesteryear and NVIDIA's latest RTX 20-series cards.
Oh, and it's priced very competitively, starting at just $280.
Essentially, the GTX 1660 Ti is based on the same Turing architecture as the RTX 20-series lineup, but without one of those cards' highlight features: ray tracing. Though that will mean you won't be able to take advantage of the realistic lighting effects provided by ray tracing in games that support it, the GTX 1660 Ti offers up impressive performance at a solid price point for those who don't mind that single limitation.
According to NVIDIA, the GTX 1660 Ti can perform up to three times faster than a GTX 960, and one-and-a-half times faster than a GTX 1060. With that kind of power, NVIDIA claims you'll be able to hit 120 frames per second in games like Fortnite, PUBG, and Apex Legends at 1080p resolutions.
In terms of raw specs, the GTX 1660 Ti packs 1,536 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR6 VRAM running at 12Gbps, and a boost clock of 1.77 GHz. Because of its Turing base, the card can hit twice the tera operations per second (TOPS) as the previous generation Pascal-based cards, NVIDIA claims. It also "supports concurrent floating point and integer operations, a unified cache architecture with 3x the L1 cache, and turbocharged performance using adaptive shading technology," NVIDIA said in a press release.
At $280, the GTX 1660 Ti is significantly cheaper than its RTX cousins, with the only significant sacrifices being the lack of ray tracing support and Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS). However, as the gaming landscape currently stands, ray tracing is supported in a handful of games, so it's unlikely to be a must-have feature for most, other than those on the bleeding edge, in the near-term.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is set to be available today starting at $280 from NVIDIA partners, including ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY and Zotac.
Get Turing power without the high price tag
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti strikes a balance between NVIDIA's last-generation cards and its latest RTX 20-series cards. While it drops support for ray tracing and Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS), the 1660 Ti comes in at $280 and still packs the same Turing architecture as NVIDIA's high-end RTX series.
