NVIDIA has been pretty aggressive with its GPU launches this year. Fall 2018 saw the release of the first three GeForce Turings, branded as RTX cards, with the RTX 2060 releasing alongside CES this January. Since then, we’ve seen the first non-RTX Turing, GTX 1660 Ti, a card that struck us as being a great deal, and a definite thorn in AMD’s side.

NVIDIA apparently didn’t think it was enough to counter the Radeon RX 590 with an equal-priced competitor that performs a lot better. Now, we have the GTX 1660, a $219 USD GPU that again considers the RX 590 its main competitor. Despite the drop from $279 to $219, the 1660 retains the 6GB framebuffer.

Aside from the basics, like core counts, the GTX 1660 differs from the 1660 Ti because it sticks to GDDR5, rather than the newer GDDR6. The change results in a card with lower overall memory bandwidth, an effective drop from 288 GB/s to 192 GB/s.

This review comes at a time when we’re working on many other things, and as it’s being written, we’ve already missed embargo, so let’s hop on board the express train to get to some conclusions quicker.

NVIDIA’s GeForce Gaming GPU Lineup Cores Base MHz Peak FP32 Memory Bandwidth TDP SRP TITAN RTX 4608 1770 16.3 TFLOPS 24GB 1 672 GB/s 280W $1,199 RTX 2080 Ti 4352 1350 13.4 TFLOPS 11GB 1 616 GB/s 250W $999 RTX 2080 2944 1515 10.0 TFLOPS 8GB 1 448 GB/s 215W $699 RTX 2070 2304 1410 7.4 TFLOPS 8GB 1 448 GB/s 175W $499 RTX 2060 1920 1680 6.4 TFLOPS 6GB 1 336 GB/s 160W $349 GTX 1660 Ti 1536 1500 5.5 TFLOPS 6GB 1 288 GB/s 120W $279 GTX 1660 1408 1530 5 TFLOPS 6GB 4 192 GB/s 120W $219 TITAN Xp 3840 1480 12.1 TFLOPS 12GB 2 548 GB/s 250W $1,199 GTX 1080 Ti 3584 1480 11.3 TFLOPS 11GB 2 484 GB/s 250W $699 GTX 1080 2560 1607 8.8 TFLOPS 8GB 2 320 GB/s 180W $499 GTX 1070 Ti 2432 1607 8.1 TFLOPS 8GB 3 256 GB/s 180W $449 GTX 1070 1920 1506 6.4 TFLOPS 8GB 3 256 GB/s 150W $379 GTX 1060 1280 1700 4.3 TFLOPS 6GB 3 192 GB/s 120W $299 GTX 1050 Ti 768 1392 2.1 TFLOPS 4GB 3 112 GB/s 75W $139 GTX 1050 640 1455 1.8 TFLOPS 2GB 3 112 GB/s 75W $109 Notes

Like the 1660 Ti, NVIDIA didn’t sample the 1660 to reviewers. Instead, its poor partners had to scramble to figure out who cards could be sent out to. GIGABYTE was kind enough to fulfill our request, so a big thanks goes out to our friends there.

Admittedly, we had expected to have a lot more time than we did with the 1660, though it wasn’t as bad as the “less than 24 hours” we had with the 1660 Ti. Usually when that happens, it means market availability might not be so hot out-of-the-gate, but fortunately, availability seems “OK” for the time-being. We see many models at Newegg, but… nothing seems to be available Amazon’s US site yet.

The memory bandwidth might be lower, but the GTX 1660 is an incredibly attractive card in comparison to the Ti, which costs $60 more. The Ti has 9% more cores, with NVIDIA itself saying it’s about 10% faster, based on the FP32 TFLOPS spec.

NVIDIA says that the GTX 1660 is an ideal card for those running a similarly targeted GPU from a few generations ago – eg: GTX 960 or 970. But, looking at the table above, it’s even a notable upgrade over the GTX 1060, by about 1.2 TFLOPS. In reality, the performance gains are likely to be even higher than that boost implies, thanks to Turing’s general optimizations (concurrent FP/INT helps at times). Both GPUs are included in the benchmark results, so we can soon put these assumptions to the test.

A Look At Test Methodology

Games Tested & Vendor Neutrality

A total of eight games are included in our current test suite. Recent additions include Battlefield V, Forza Horizon 4, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Beyond these eight titles, UL’s 3DMark and VRMark, as well as Unigine’s Superposition, are used for some quick and dirty tests that you may be able to run at home.

Here’s the full list of tested synthetic benchmarks, games, and developer allegiances:

Battlefield V

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – AMD partner

– F1 2018

Far Cry 5 – AMD partner

– Forza Horizon 4

Monster Hunter World

Shadow of the Tomb Raider – NVIDIA partner

– Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands – NVIDIA partner

– UL 3DMark & VRMark

Unigine Superposition

For our apples-to-apples testing, the graphics settings seen above apply to every one of our tested resolutions so as to deliver easily comparable results. In most cases, each configuration is tested twice, with more runs added if the initial results make the extra testing necessary (which isn’t required too often). Note that VSync is disabled at the driver level to prevent games from enabling it without us noticing.