The Affordable Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 is a True Successor to GTX 1060

The long-awaited successor of GTX 1060 has finally been launched. Its predecessor is still at the top of the steam hardware survey and is the most popular graphics card available. According to reports from NVIDIA, the newly launched GTX 1660 will be available for $219.

The launch price is in between the launch price of GTX 1060 3 GB and GTX 1060 6 GB. GeForce 6GB GTX 1660 is a less pricy counterpart of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. It will serve the GTX 1060 generation with a similar upgrade, however, the GPU used is the same as GTX 1660 Ti but with slightly downgraded configuration.

The new GTX 1660 should be about 15-30 percent better than the GTX 1060 which means it’s about 113 percent faster than the GTX 960 from two generations ago, according to NVidia.

This is considered as the most important launch from NVIDIA this year. The same 6^th generation architecture used in the Turing family is used for GTX 1660 as well. However, it is the most reasonable Turing based GPU in the family. To reduce the price, NVidia’s new midranger doesn’t support DLSS or ray tracing (both are exclusive to the RTX 2000-series).

When compared with the $279 GTX 1660 Ti, the cheaper vanilla GTX 1660 model ships with slightly slower GDDR5 video RAM and fewer CUDA cores. More detailed differences are listed below:

• The core count of CUDA has dropped from 1536 to 1408.
• Texture units have dropped from 96 to 88.
• Memory clock has been downgraded from 12 GHz to 8 GHz.
• Bandwidth from 288.1 GB/s to 192GB/s.
• Improvement in the base clock is seen. It has been upgraded from 1500 MHz to 1530MHz.
• Boost clock has also been upgraded from 1770 MHz to 1785 MHz.
• Single precision perf has dropped from 5.5 TFLOPS to 5 TFLOPS.

The VRAM, TDP and transistor count is the same in both versions.

The card is going on sale from March 14th and will be sold by the usual NVidia partners like Asus, EVGA etc.