I stopped looking at GPU news for half a year and I’m already lost, there is the GTX 1060 and 1070 and now there is the RTX 2060 and the new 1660 Ti is as far as I saw basically the same as a 1070 performance wise, but with just 6gb’s of VRAM like the 1060.
So…just why? Is it essentially like a non-RTX 2060? Is it more efficient than the 1070?
Yeah, that’s about the summary of it. 1070 performance at 1070 prices. They need to have something to offer the mid-end consumer now that they’re phasing out the 10-series cards and the 20-series has gotten premium pricing with honestly not that much more performance than the 10-series.
Even Nvidia don’t seem entirely clear on what they want it to be. At first it was said that it wouldn’t have RTX support, but then they changed their mind and said it would be patched in, but since it’s a different GPU from the RTX-labeled cards it lacks hardware support and will probably be limited to some lighting effects. Or, I guess it could run full ray-tracing in 5 FPS, maybe.
The 10XX cards are being discontinued (or have been) and Nvidia still needs to compete on the lower end of the gaming card market. Thus the 1660Ti.
Linus Tech tips on YouTube recently did a video about this very card. They too were a bit confused at where it was supposed to fit into nVidia’s lineup. The cover the cost/benefit of this and similar cards in both upgrade and new build conditions.