Nvidia may be set to debut a new card built on its Turing architecture but without the RTX moniker. The rumored card, said to be called the GTX 1660 Ti, would sit beneath the RTX 2060 in Nvidia’s product stack offering midrange performance at a presumably lower price point. Its use of the GTX nomenclature would suggest it would also ship without support for Nvidia’s ray tracing (and possibly DLSS) features.
As capable as Nvidia’s RTX generation of graphics cards are, they aren’t the most affordable. Its initial lineup had the $500+ RTX 2070 as its most entry-level card and even the recently debuted RTX 2060 isn’t cheap, at $350 — despite its 1070 Ti-like performance. A 1660 Ti though, could be much more competitive in the hotly contested midrange. Nvidia’s aging GTX 1060 is by far the most popular graphics card among Steam gamers, so a replacement for that card with greater performance and a comparable price would likely be well received.
But how much more powerful would a GTX 1660 Ti be? Since this is a very early rumor, we don’t have a lot to go on, but Videocardz cites three sources that confirm the card’s existence and a couple which give us a hint of its potential. Reportedly, the 1660 Ti would ship out with a weaker Turing GPU than the RTX 2060, known as TU116. It would come with 1,526 CUDA cores, which is 20 percent fewer than those found in the 2060. But that’s also 20 percent more than found in the GTX 1060. Considering it sports the same 6GB of GDDR6 as the 2060, it’s likely to be closer in performance to that card than the GTX 1060.
It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch of the imagination to think of the GTX 1660 Ti as a 1070 analog. That would be similar to the kind of generational upgrades we’ve seen elsewhere in the Turing range, with the 2070 being roughly comparable to the 1080, and the 2080 to the 1080 Ti.
There has been no hint of a potential release date for the 1660 Ti as of yet, nor any word on pricing. We would expect it to only make an appearance when Nvidia has cleared some of its stock of GTX 1060s, though, as it wouldn’t want to affect clearance of those older cards. Nvidia said in late 2018 that it would take as much as half a year to clear the excess stock of GTX 1060s it accrued after the collapse of the cryptocurrency mining boom.
