Turing Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvi...002-6.html

The 1060 had a good run. It launched at $250 and served up excellent frame rates at 1920 x 1080, gingerly stepping on Radeon RX 480’s toes in the process. However, GeForce GTX 1660 Ti blows right past it in the benchmarks. Our results show the 1660 Ti averaging about 100 FPS across our suite, beating Radeon RX 590, roughly tying the old GeForce GTX 1070, and losing slightly to Radeon RX Vega 56. And that’s at a price point just $30 higher than the 1060 6GB in 2016.

Step up to 2560 x 1440 and the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti continues delivering playable performance with an average of more than 60 FPS between 12 different games. That’s 19% faster than Radeon RX 590 and darn near even with GeForce GTX 1070. Radeon RX Vega 56’s lead grows to 10%, likely due to a massive memory bandwidth advantage that staves off bottlenecks at higher resolutions. But the cheapest model in stock on Newegg at the time of writing was $400. A 43% price premium on a card rated for 75%-higher power consumption just doesn’t make sense for 10%-higher frame rates.

AMD does appear to be chipping away at Radeon RX 590’s price. Entry-level models still cost $260, though. They need to be lower to justify 85% of GeForce GTX 1660 Ti’s performance at 188% of its power consumption.

Previous-gen GeForce cards get their fair share of shade, too. Remaining GeForce GTX 1060s fail to shine with GeForce GTX 1660 Ti beating them by 30%+, despite the fact you can find a 6GB model in the $260 range. And obviously you’re going to want to avoid the few GeForce GTX 1070s left on shelves priced at $310 and up.

Taking a step back, then, it looks like GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is the card to beat for fast-paced gaming at 1920 x 1080 and solid performance at 2560 x 1440. Our only hesitation in recommending it comes from GeForce RTX 2060, which doesn’t look as good in our performance per dollar charts but does include Nvidia’s Tensor/RT cores.

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/...XS/35.html

GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is NVIDIA's answer for the highly competitive sub-$300 segment. The card is based on the all-new TU116 graphics processor, which has been specifically designed to meet the demands of that market, which is mostly "price". Unlike other Turing GPUs, TU116 does not feature acceleration for RTX real-time raytracing or DLSS, because the specialized hardware consumes a significant portion of the die area on other Turing GPUs, which increases manufacturing cost significantly. NVIDIA did keep the other improvements of Turing though; like GDDR6 memory, larger caches, concurrent execution of float and integer operations and adaptive/variable rate shading.

As a result, when averaged over all our gaming benchmarks at 1080p, we see GTX 1660 Ti beat the Pascal based GTX 1070, and roughly match AMD's RX Vega 56 — pretty impressive for a mid-range card. While we don't have a GTX 1660 Ti reference-design, we expect this card to perform very closely to one, because it is clocked only marginally higher than reference. Compared to the RTX 2060, which is NVIDIA's next-fastest SKU, the MSI GTX 1660 Ti Ventus XS is 13% behind. Compared to GTX 1060 6 GB, which the GTX 1660 Ti replaces, the performance uplift is 40%, at a higher price point though. AMD just released the RX 590, on a 12 nanometer process no less, to address the growing requirements of the mid-range segment, GTX 1660 Ti makes short shrift of that, offering 30% more performance. With those performance results, GTX 1660 Ti is a great choice for gamers with a Full HD monitor, running at maximum details. If you are willing to dial down detail settings a bit, then it should be able to reach 60 FPS at 1440p in most titles, too.
...
The lack of ray-tracing and DLSS on GTX 1660 Ti seems like a big deal at first, especially considering how much NVIDIA is pushing those technologies. While both are extremely promising, they are not the most important thing to have right now, especially when every dollar matters. While I have no doubt that RTX support will be growing vastly, only few titles support it at this time, so I don't think anyone could be blamed for wanting to skip the tech for now and wait until it matures more. Looking at silicon economics, including RTX/DLSS would have either driven die size (= cost) so high that reaching the targeted sub-$300 price point wouldn't be possible anymore, or the number of shader cores would have had to be reduced, which would have resulted in no performance improvement over AMD — NVIDIA went the other route. "RTX" is a great vehicle for NVIDIA to sell a feature, which is more than just "higher FPS". Specifically, this targets people who are comfortable with 1080p 60 FPS and are even willing to play low details, as long as their GPU is affordable. If however they feel they miss out on visuals, something that DX12 couldn't achieve, they might be willing to spend more and go for RTX 2060, for example. The next step for NVIDIA is transitioning to the 7 nm production process, which increases density and should allow smaller GPUs to have RTX, too. I also wouldn't be surprised to see NVIDIA haters on the forums, who previously dismissed RTX as "useless", now ask "wut no RTX?"

Priced at $279, the MSI GTX 1660 Ti Ventus XS comes at NVIDIA MSRP pricing, which is great, as it makes the card much more competitive against other offerings, be them from AMD or NVIDIA (Pascal). GTX 1660 Ti does compete with RX 590, which it beats with ease: 30% faster, a fraction of the power consumption, similar fan noise. The RTX 2060 starts at $350, is 15% faster, and offers NVIDIA's RTX features like ray-tracing and DLSS — definitely an option if you can save up more money and are looking to play at 1440p. Strong competition has come in the past few days from AMD Vega 56, which has seen its price dropped to $330 (€ 269 including VAT in some European countries). This of course makes a compelling argument for people looking for price/performance, but Vega 56 runs much hotter and noisier than GTX 1660 Ti. Looking at the board designs I have no doubt that prices for GTX 1660 Ti can go down much further, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it at or below $250 soon, at which point it would spark the upgrade-itch for many users, especially those with older cards, like GeForce 900 series.