Where's the best place to buy a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti?

Amazon is the best place to buy

Amazon is the best choice to purchase the GTX 1660 Ti due to the availability of promotions, super-fast next-day delivery, and worldwide shipping. The online retail giant also allows potential buyers to ask questions about products before putting down hard-earned cash. Owner reviews also make the purchasing decision that much easier.

For next-day delivery and other Prime-only benefits, you'll need to subscribe to Amazon Prime, which you can try with a free trial.

What is ray tracing?

We've been using polygons and rasterization to create 3D imagery in games, creating virtual environments without having to deal with physics and light. Now, NVIDIA is wanting to take the traditional method of creating 3D images and flip it on its head with "ray tracing." This technique has been exclusive to pre-rendered animations until now, thanks to new GPU hardware.

Ray tracing is the calculation and simulation of rays in a 3D world. It's all in the name. Instead of manually adding shadows, light, and other properties to polygons and 3D images, the system traces rays of light as they bounce around a scene. This results in a more realistic visual experience but requires advanced hardware and more power.

This is what the RTX 1660 Ti misses out on since it does not feature any Turing cores. If you are looking for RTX cards, check out our collection of the best graphics cards on the market today.

The price of Turing power without ray tracing

The GTX 1660 Ti confuses the rather simple naming scheme for NVIDIA's GPUs. GTX 10-series cards are capable GPUs that can easily handle modern games at 1440p and even 4K if you turn down the settings a little, while RTX is NVIDIA's next-gen family of cards with the advanced ray-tracing functionality.

Not all games support ray tracing and not all gamers want or desire to use it. That's why the GTX lineup remains a viable option. The new GTX 1660 Ti makes sense by combining both worlds, being priced alongside GTX cards but rocking Turing generation performance and GDDR6 VRAM. The only downside is the name: GTX 1660 Ti.

On paper, the name is actually sound. The GTX 1660 Ti is between the GTX 1060 and 1070 in terms of performance, but the company switched up the name that makes it appear above and beyond the GTX 1080 Ti to anyone not familiar with the specifications. Still, it's worth considering if you're after a budget-friendly card from the Turing generation of NVIDIA GPUs and can't hold out another month of saving for an RTX 2060.