GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Review: No Ray Tracing But It’s Awesome

NVIDIA has recently released the GTX 1660 Ti, a mid-range GPU with no fancy ray-tracing tech found in the more expensive RTX 2060, 2070, 2080 and 2080 Ti GPUs. There were rumors floating around since early 2019 for the GTX 1660 Ti, and now here it is.

Pricing and Availability

The GTX 1660 Ti is priced at $279 in the US, and at around 26,000 INR in India. The pricing is marginally lower than the RTX 2060, which starts at $349 instead and has RT Cores for ray-tracing in games.

The GPU is available through many retailers like Amazon and Newegg in the US. In India, you’ll be able to buy it through many retailers like MDComputers and Amazon India.

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Turing Architecture with No Ray-Tracing

The GTX 1660 Ti features the all-new Turing Architecture built on the 12nm manufacturing process, just like the more expensive RTX 20 Series GPUs. I previously believed that with the launch of the RTX 20 Series GPUs, NVIDIA would go all in with the RTX Platform but then rumors for the GTX 1660 Ti surfaced. They released the RTX 2060 for $349 at CES 2019, a promising GPU which definitely helped in making ray-tracing more mainstream. But still, there wasn’t any new sub-$300 graphics card for budget gamers. The GTX 1660 Ti changes that, starting at $279 with GTX 1070 class performance.

So how big of a deal is no ray-tracing on the GTX 1660 Ti? Not so much, really. Support for Ray-tracing is limited right now. It’s definitely still evolving and hasn’t become mainstream yet, which is also why AMD decided to release their high-end Radeon VII GPU without any ray-tracing tech.

Performance Review & Comparision

The GTX 1660 Ti performs incredibly well and outperforms the Radeon RX 590 by quite a margin. At Ultra Settings, it gets around 10FPS less compared to the more expensive RTX 2060. That’s $279 versus $349 for a mere 10FPS difference if you don’t care about ray-tracing! The GPU is a solid performer at 1080p and is definitely capable of 1440p Gaming as well if you’re willing to turn down the settings by a small notch.

As for thermal performance, the GTX 1660 Ti has a TDP of 120W. Good partner cards will operate at stable temperatures below 70C, with some variants touching below 65C. Looks like the GPU has really great overclocking potential, and if you choose the right card you could overclock it to near-RTX 2060 performance levels with ease!