Some in the PC-gaming community might see the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, Nvidia's first GTX-branded (versus RTX-branded) "Turing" GPU, as Nvidia's admission that the world wasn't ready so soon for the ray-tracing features in its RTX line.
But video cards are roadmapped much further out than just a few months.
So while this graphics card takes Nvidia's RTX tech a step backward, removing some of its future-looking flagship elements, that was the plan all along.
The result is a chopped-down, smoothed-out Turing-architecture card that emphasizes value for players today.
Few can afford $500-plus for a muscle card, and the GTX 1660 Ti fills the needs of a specific subset of gamers (online multiplayer enthusiasts who need high refresh rates) but also holds its own against slightly more expensive cards like the GeForce RTX 2060 with older AAA titles.
In its $309 MSI-made form we tested, it's a winner in a price band close to, but discrete from, that of the also-excellent, Editors' Choice-winning RTX 2060 Founders Edition.
Sometimes, Even the Gods Stumble a Little
Nvidia has been winning for a while, and winning a lot.
Whether it's sending AMD's Radeon cards to the cleaners with regularity in benchmarking face-offs, seeing its stock price (despite some recent quakes) increase 10 times over in two years, or leading the charge on bleeding-edge tech like real-time ray tracing, for a while it seemed that Nvidia was an unstoppable silicon juggernaut.
But then RTX happened.
Or rather, it didn't happen, more specifically.
Despite Nvidia's posturing about how the special features in its RTX line of cards would usher in a new era of high-end graphical fidelity, nearly six months after the release of GeForce RTX cards, only two games support real-time ray tracing: Battlefield V, and Metro: Exodus.
With a line of pricey graphics cards on the market that perform like champs but don't yet do much to justify their increased, market-resetting cost, Nvidia quickly found itself in a position where it needed a card with a more common touch.
Enter the GTX 1660 Ti.
Streamlined for the Budget Gamer
The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is based off the same 12nm fabrication process and Turing architecture that powers the RTX line of cards.
The primary difference, at the architectural level, is the lack of tensor or ray-tracing cores that set RTX cards apart from their GTX predecessors.
The GTX 1660 Ti strips away those cost-boosting bits of the RTX cards while keeping most of the benefits that make the Turing architecture so robust.
Its reduced die size (284mm2), increased transistor count (6.6 billion), and low power requirements (130 watts) make the GTX 1660 Ti a reasonable alternative to pricier RTX cards, and obvious upgrades to the previous GTX 1060 and GTX 1070 line.
Speaking of price, at a $279 suggested MSRP for basic GTX 1660 Ti cards, it's clear the market segment that Nvidia is looking to target with the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti: the heart of the gaming-card mainstream.
This is close to the same price that the GTX 1060 first launched at, back in 2016 ($249), and it competes directly with the current cost of several AMD Radeon RX 590 8GB models making the rounds today.
The model we tested for this review was MSI's GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X 6GB, which retails for $309 MSRP, $30 more than the most basic versions of the GTX 1660 Ti.
The extra cost is due to MSI's custom cooling hardware and from-the-factory boosted clock speeds.
MSI pushes this card from Nvidia's suggested base clocks of 1,500MHz/1,700MHz (base/boost) in the standard edition to 1,500MHz/1,875MHz in the Gaming X.
Aside from the clock-speed uptick, RGB bling, and increased cooling capacity, however, all other aspects of the Gaming X remain the same as what you would see in other third-party GTX 1660 Ti cards.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Versus Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060
To give a frame of reference for how Nvidia has stepped up its game from the previous generation of GTX cards, here's a 1:1 comparison of the MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and the reference-card specs of the GTX 1060...
| MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X 6G | Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 (Reference Card) | |
| Date of Introduction | February 2019 | July 2016 |
| Manufacturing Process / Die Size | 12nm / 284mm2 | 16nm / 200mm2 |
| Transistor Count | 6.6 billion | 4.4 billion |
| Compute Units / Stream Processors | 24 / 1,536 | 10 / 1,280 |
| ROPs | 48 | 48 |
| Base / Boost GPU Clocks | 1,500MHz / 1,875MHz | 1,506MHz / 1,708MHz |
| Video Memory | 6GB GDDR6 | 6GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Interface / Bandwidth | 192-bit / 288.1GBps | 192-bit / 192GBps |
| Board Power | 130 watts | 120 watts |
| Power Connectors | One eight-pin | One six-pin |
| Recommended Launch Price | $279 (reference cards), $309 (this MSI card) | $249 |
Though the numbers are a bit vague from a distance, once you get granular, you start to see the more substantial benefits of Turing over Pascal in action.
Namely, these are the increased memory bandwidth throughput over the same channel width, the one-third bump in transistor count, and the nontrivial boost in the number of compute units and stream processors.
The launch pricing of both cards makes it clear that Nvidia is intending to directly replace the need for a GTX 1060 in the eyes of gamers, and with so many benefits to be had (both in raw specs and performance numbers, found below), it's obvious that the value-add is substantial for only a $30 suggested MSRP difference.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Versus AMD Radeon RX 590 Versus GeForce RTX 2060
One major point we've hit on in our preliminary card comparions is whether or not you should go with the GTX 1660 Ti, or shell out the little bit of extra cash to upgrade to the RTX line with the RTX 2060.
Here's an initial spec breakdown...
| MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X 6GB | AMD Radeon RX 590 (Reference Spec) | Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 (Reference Card) | |
| Architecture | Turing | Polaris | Turing |
| Manufacturing Process / Die Size | 12nm / 284mm2 | 12nm / 232mm2 | 12nm FinFET / 545mm2 |
| Transistor Count | 6.6 billion | 5.7 billion | 13.6 billion |
| Processing Cores | 1,536 CUDA cores | 2,304 stream processors | 2,944 CUDA cores |
| Base / Boost GPU Clocks | 1,500MHz / 1,875MHz | 1,469MHz / 1,545MHz | 1,515MHz / 1,710MHz |
| Video Memory | 6GB GDDR6 | 8GB GDDR5 | 8GB GDDR6 |
| Memory Interface / Bandwidth | 192-bit / 288.1GBps | 256-bit / 256GBps | 256-bit / 448GBps |
| Board Power | 130 watts | 175 watts | 215 watts |
| Power Connectors | One eight-pin | One eight-pin | One six-pin, one eight-pin |
| Recommended Launch Price | $309 ($279 for base GTX 1660 Ti models) | $279 | $349 |
Not to leave out AMD, of course: We've also included its Radeon RX 590 as a part of the comparison.
Its suggested MSRP, is, as mentioned earlier, right on point with the base-model GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, though as you'll see in a moment, from a performance perspective, both the GTX 1660 Ti and the RTX 2060 leave the RX 590 scrambling.
MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X: A Card Walk-Around
The MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X 6GB is one of three different GTX 1660 Ti models that the company will be selling in the US.
These comprise the Gaming X reviewed here, as well as the Armor and the Ventus XS, all of which feature the same chip but wildly different sizes and cooling configurations.
One of the most interesting parts about the launch of the GTX 1660 Ti is the sheer variety of configurations that the card comes in (the link has a rundown of all we've found), from stout one-fan cards made for micro-PC builds to big, honking triple-fan cards that would only fit in a full-ATX case.
The Gaming X edition is the Goldilocks of these two extremes, with two fans sitting on top of the company's proprietary Twin Frozr 7 cooling system.
The Torx Fan 3.0 system makes use of two separate fan-blade styles on the fans: one "dispersion" fan blade that accelerates airflow into the card, while a traditional fan blade keeps that same airflow steady to the heat sink.
The entire card itself measures 9.7 inches long, which isn't terribly large for most case configurations.
But, as mentioned above, if it does happen to be a bit big for your tastes or case, you have plenty more GTX 1660 Ti styles (including some shorter single-fan ones) to choose among that will match anyone's space budget perfectly.
The card is pretty minimally kitted out, even by MSI's standards.
On the back, you'll find the standard aluminum plate (designed to keep the memory banks cool), while the front carries the two aforementioned fans in a housing that's not too aggressively styled, but not meek either.
The RGB situation is notably toned down, with a single light bar atop the card that illuminates the MSI logo (right next to the single eight-pin power connector).
Two more thin LED strips are on the underside of each fan.
Other than that, there's not much that sets the Gaming X apart from its cousin, the MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Armor.
On the back, you'll find a more-than-standard layout of three DisplayPort 1.4 slots, and one HDMI 2.0b.
No DVI for this card, as MSI follows the trend that some manufacturers seem to be making in the past year, to ditch the standard entirely in favor of adding more slots for more modern cabling solutions.
That said, some other GTX 1660 Ti cards do include a DVI, in the event you have an older monitor that needs one.
Again, the GTX 1660 Ti card-roundup link above will point you to plenty of options.
Testing: In Short, a Killer Mainstream Card
PC Labs ran through a series of DirectX 11- and 12-based synthetic and real-world benchmarks on the MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Gaming X.
Our test rig is equipped with an Intel Core i7-8700K processor, 16GB of G.Skill DDR4 memory, a solid-state boot drive, and an Aorus Z370 Gaming 7 motherboard.
For our benchmark results, we wanted to focus some of our efforts (in an all-new add-on to our usual testing regimen) on the esports aspect of the GTX 1660 Ti's abilities, seeing as much of the heat from Nvidia around this card has centered on its ability to push 1080p multiplayer games to their highest possible frame rates, giving players a competitive advantage if the card is paired with a high-refresh-rate monitor (and, presumably, fast hands).
We also ran the GTX 1660 Ti through the rest of our standard benchmarks, which test a card's abilities to handle AAA games at the highest possible quality settings.
The only lead-in we'll have here is that, for the most part, we don't believe this card should be judged strictly on these AAA-game numbers, given its more competitive/online-multiplayer skew (though those numbers are impressive, nonetheless).
Synthetic Benchmarks
3DMark Fire Strike Ultra
Synthetic benchmarks can be good predictors of real-world gaming performance.
Futuremark's circa-2013 Fire Strike Ultra is still a go-to for 4K-based gaming.
We're looking only at the graphics subscore, not the overall score.
Because the GTX 1660 Ti wasn't tuned specifically for 4K gaming, we weren't surprised to see it actually get beat by cards like the RX 590 or the GTX 1070 in that area.
As you'll see below, the lead those cards maintain quickly diminishes once the GTX 1660 Ti is given the space to flex in its home gym.
3DMark Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme
This is Futuremark's benchmark for predicting the performance of DirectX 12-enabled games.
It uses major features of the API, including asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading.
Time Spy was our first indication that the GTX 1660 Ti was starting to pull ahead of similarly priced options, and even keep pace with more premium cards like its slightly older and bigger cousin, the RTX 2060.
Unigine Superposition
Our last synthetic benchmark is Unigine's 2017 release, Superposition.
This benchmark does incorporate ray tracing, but it's done in software, not hardware, and thus doesn't utilize the RT cores of the RTX 20 series in these charts.
Unigine results for the GTX 1660 Ti were probably the closest to what we got out of the real-world gaming tests, in terms of performance ratios in comparison to other cards.
So, let's get down to those.
Real-World Gaming
The following benchmarks are games that you can play.
The charts themselves will list the settings used (typically the highest in-game presets and, if available, DirectX 12).
As mentioned, we've got a mix of AAA titles in here as well as some more optimized, multiplayer-focused titles, since that is the primary metric by which Nvidia is hoping the GTX 1660 Ti is ultimately measured by.
A quick note: Though most of our game tests are maxed out in graphical fidelity to push the cards to their limit, multiplayer gaming is all about maintaining the best balance between graphical fidelity and frame rate.
As such, we've kept Apex Legends, CS:GO, and Rainbow Six: Siege tuned to the best combination of necessary improvements in settings (higher anti-aliasing and lower shadows, for example), while still trying to keep frame rates for 1080p games above that coveted 144Hz mark.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider
Square Enix's recent title is our first real-world test.
This game is well-optimized for the PC platform, but very demanding at its higher visual quality settings.
In these tests, the GTX 1660 Ti did buckle a bit, but that's to be expected since SOTR features some of the most up-to-date tech in graphics today.
Here, the card scored similarly to the currently much pricier Radeon RX Vega 64, and about 15 percent behind the GeForce RTX 2060.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
The 2015 predecessor to Shadow of the Tomb Raider is still a great benchmark.
These results were a bit off from the rest of the crowd; we're not entirely sure why.
Despite beating the Vega 64 in some tests, the GTX 1660 Ti fell well behind the curve in ROTR.
It still beat the RX 590, though, which for the slightly higher price still makes the Nvidia card a better deal overall.
Far Cry 5 and Far Cry Primal
The fourth and fifth installments in the Far Cry series are based on DirectX 11, but still demanding.
We're looping the benchmark charts together here since they benchmark similarly.
Far Cry 5 is a recent AAA title that runs great on pretty much anything, thanks to some seriously pro optimization techniques from the team at Ubisoft, and was one of the best tests for the GTX 1660 Ti, when it came to edging toward the GTX 2060 in performance.
Final Fantasy XV
We'll take a respite from frame-rate-based benchmarks for Final Fantasy XV.
When the Final Fantasy XV...
