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The GTX 1660 Ti starts soon. According to the latest information, it has also installed 192 tensor cores that could be used for DLSS.

GTX with tensor cores, right?

With Turing, Nvidia has completely destroyed the familiar structures around its GeForce graphics cards. The RTX 2060 as the actual successor of the GTX 1060 is no longer really in the middle class, because the price is simply too high. The company is therefore planning another mid-range model: the GTX 1660 Ti. It is said to be faster than the GTX 1070. This gets its own chip called TU116, which does without the hardware elements for raytracing and DLSS that are characteristic for Turing. These cores, called tensor and RT cores, make the chips of the RTX graphics cards significantly more expensive.

At least with the tensor cores we could all have been wrong. This shows a screenshot from the AIDA64 tool posted by the Twitter user @KOMACHI_ENSAKA. This screenshot confirms on the one hand some data that were already known. For example, a chip called TU116-A400 is used. It’s a 12nm Turing chip, not a Pascal chip. 1,536 CUDA cores, 96 TMUs and 48 ROPs are installed. On the other hand, the screenshot also shows information that was not known in this way. Apparently 192 tensor cores are also built into the GTX 1660 Ti. This could also be an error, but then the question arises why the tool does not also mention RT cores. It might therefore be possible that Nvidia actually uses tensor cores in the TU116 chip.

DLSS also for the GTX 1660 Ti?

The background could be that Nvidia with Turing has also built in the upscaling technique DLSS. For the technology the tensor cores are necessary for some calculations. The fact that no RT cores are used excludes raytracing on the GTX 1660 Ti, but DLSS could become an important factor in the future. The 192 tensor cores could enable future purchasers of the new 1660 Ti to enjoy this feature as well. For comparison: the RTX 2060 is equipped with 240 tensor cores. We’ll see if the leak is true in two days. The GTX 1660 Ti starts on 22 February 2019 at 9 am EST.