Nvidia’s new 1660 cards will utilise Turing GPU microarchitecture found in the company’s RTX series.
In the wake of AMD Navi leaks and Radeon VII releases, Nvidia has finally come out of the shadows with leaked pictures of the three new graphics cards. The 1660 series will replace Nvidia’s GeForce 10 series GPUs and are estimated to be priced in the $200 to $350 price range.
Nvidia’s new 1660 cards will utilise Turing GPU microarchitecture found in the company’s RTX series. The new cards won’t feature real-time Ray Tracing and Tensor Cores technology, which is a simple and obvious thing to do when attempting to reduce the price to get them to fit in the budget range.
Videocardz – the source that first leaked the pictures of the new 1660 cards – revealed that the new cards would launch on the 22nd of February. The leaked images reveal three upcoming cards, namely – The EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti XC, Palit GTX 1660 Ti StormX and Galax GeForce GTX 1660 Ti.
The leaked images reveal that the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti features Turing-based shaders and 6GB of GDDR6 video memory. While the leaked photos include a mix of stock and original images, it isn’t hard to doctor images of graphics card boxes. However, each of the rumoured models has an RTX 2060 counterpart.
Nvidia has already confirmed a new budget line of cards without Ray Tracing support that will replace the GeForce 10 series. While the GeForce GTX 1060 can go head-to-head with any one of AMD’s (Radeon RX 580 & RX 590) budget graphics cards, they are based on the previous Pascal architecture. While the Polaris architecture on the AMD cards isn’t new, the RX 590 features some major updates to the original foundations, including a 12nm process node.
With AMD’s budget Navi GPUs not set to release till the second quarter of the year, a budget take on Turing architecture could see Nvidia annihilate any competition posed by AMD’s Polaris cards. Launching the Radeon VII at the high-end, enthusiast level, has given Nvidia a significant advantage to capture the budget space with new affordable Turing cards.
