Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti seems like it should be a $ 280 mainstream favorite

Nvidia has today delivered its latest mainstream gaming graphics chip, the GTX 1660 Ti, consistent with our expectations based on previous rumors. Although there is no Nvidia reference design card – these are the "Founders Edition" models – the cards integrating the chip should start at around $ 280 (£ 260 in the UK, this is which represents approximately AU $ 475).

The GPU largely eliminates what makes the new flagship product RTX Notable cards – mainly hearts, which allow games to incorporate ray tracing in real time. But it is based on the new Turing architecture compared to the Pascal 10 series, offering better parallel processing, adaptive shaders, a unified memory architecture and more cache than the GTX 1060 that it apparently replaces.

It also lacks some features of the RTX series: no support for VirtualLink, the standard for single cable VR, or the SLI bridge for dual card configurations. Like ray casting, these are features you will probably not miss for a while. In addition, no headset supports VirtualLink and the 1660 Ti would not really be a card to use in multi-GPU configurations, anyway.

Rumors are circulating that it could have unnoticed artificial intelligence accelerator nuclei for DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling, which allows you to create smaller textures in high resolution gameplay with lower impact), either incorrect or they are there for production reasons but deliberately disabled. This board is designed for fast, mid-range 1080p gaming systems – cost-effective systems with 450-watt power supplies configured at not so cheap levels.

People who had the opportunity to compare a map (such as Anandtech) ranked it in the top performance class of about 30% to that of the GTX 1060. That equates to roughly a GTX 1070 (It has 2GB of video memory less than the 1070's 8GB) and a bit slower than an AMD RX Vega 56 – both being more expensive.