New rumors swirling in gaming hardware circles suggest that Nvidia is gearing up to launch a Super variant of its GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card.
While the rumblings about a new GPU from the industry titan don’t offer anything in terms of a release date or a concrete price point, they do suggest that the GTX 1660 Super will debut somewhere in the $300 range, and will arrive bearing an upgrade from the GTX 1660’s 6GB of GDDR5 memory to the same amount of GDDR6 memory. This would result in almost double the transfer rates, or an increase from 8Gbps to 14Gbps from the original model to the Super refresh. Other than that, there is no word on any other spec improvements over the GTX 1660 Super’s namesake.
As sparse as these rumors are on details, it makes sense for Nvidia to launch a renewed assault on AMD, especially considering how the latter has made a concerted effort to outflank the former recently. Now that the dust has begun to settle since Nvidia’s RTX 2060 Super, 2070 Super, and 2080 Super were unveiled, it is becoming clearer that Nvidia did not achieve the decisive market dominance it envisioned. For one thing, AMD appears to have feinted Nvidia, causing Nvidia to market these RTX Super GPUs at an inflated price point. And when pricing was supplemented with a head-to-head spec comparison between the Nvidia RTX Super line and the AMD Radeon RX 5700, Nvidia did not emerge with a clear advantage: While the Nvidia GPUs’ raw performance was superior, their high cost compared to AMD precluded them from taking a clear advantage.
In an industry as cutthroat as gaming internals, it’s not enough to simply keep pace by maintaining existing quality output. To thrive, manufacturers have to make constant improvement, and Nvidia had enough stumbles to slow it in its race to keep up with its nemesis. Between its lackluster RTX Super launch and the alarming crop of severe vulnerabilities in its firmware, Nvidia has lost a bit of ground to AMD, as recent sales figures plainly illustrate.
Because price advantage (or even just parity) has been a sore spot for Nvidia as of late, the GTX 1660 Super could be the company’s attempt to pull even with AMD on that front, as such a GPU would be competitive with the Radeon RX590 and below. Meeting AMD in the budget gaming arena would also help Nvidia cement a commanding position, since its RTX and RTX Super lines would draw the ray tracing die-hards which AMD does not seem very interested in attracting, while the GTX 1660 Super would at least fend off AMD from seizing the budget gamer demographic.
Regardless of what form the GTX 1660 Super ultimately takes, Nvidia would do well to finish its regrouping soon, as AMD is threatening an “Nvidia Killer” that could put an already winded Nvidia on the back foot.
