Tuesday, October 29th 2019

NVIDIA Releases GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER Graphics Card: GDDR6 Makes A World of Difference

by
btarunr
 Discuss (32 Comments)
NVIDIA today released the GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER graphics card at USD $229, just $10 more than the GTX 1660. The card has identical specifications to the GTX 1660, with 1,408 CUDA cores, 88 TMUs, and 48 ROPs. It even has the same GPU clock speeds, at 1530 MHz core with 1750 MHz GPU Boost. The not-so-secret sauce lending it a major performance boost is memory - GDDR6. Armed with 6 GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory, faster than even what the GTX 1660 Ti ships with, NVIDIA is able to shore up performance of the GTX 1660 by near two figures. The GTX 1660 Super is probably designed to preempt AMD's Radeon RX 5500 series. A purely partner-driven launch, the GTX 1660 SUPER is available from today, in custom-design boards from nearly all NVIDIA partners.

We've reviewed five GeForce GTX 1660 Super cards today: ASUS Phoenix, Gigabyte Gaming OC, MSI Gaming X, Palit GamingPro OC and Zotac AMP.

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32 Comments on NVIDIA Releases GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER Graphics Card: GDDR6 Makes A World of Difference

#1
juiseman
Its good to see lower prices and completion (well, slight competition) in the GPU space again. I'm kind of rooting
for Intel also; this should lower some prices some more. I'm just glad the over inflated "mining craze" gpu prices have gone close to normal again.
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#2
londiste
I for one dislike it for the same reason as other Super cards - going back in power efficiency sucks.
Price/performance boost - even a fairly minor one - is welcome though, I suppose.
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#4
medi01
btarunr1660 SUPER graphics card at USD $229, just $10 more than the GTX 1660.
juisemanIts good to see lower prices
Yeah, but sometimes you need to unsee them.
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#5
rruff
londistePrice/performance boost - even a fairly minor one - is welcome though, I suppose.
5% cost increase for 10% performance increase. I'll take that...

The best part is that Nvidia knows exactly what the new AMD cards will bring and they are preemptively improving their performance/cost ratio in response. Should be good to have a little more competition.
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#6
Xzibit
Should of been called 1660 Crazy.
Jensen Huan Nvidia CEOit's a forgone conclusion that we're going to buy a new graphics card and it's going to last through two years, three years ,four years to not have ray tracing is just crazy.
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#7
Fluffmeister
Think of it as "Nexgen memory" for Navi, it's exciting on paper, but ultimately it's just marketing.
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#8
medi01
rruffThe best part is that Nvidia knows exactly what the new AMD cards will bring
AMD has released the slides when they announced 5500, showing perf at around 590 levels.
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#9
rruff
medi01AMD has released the slides when they announced 5500, showing perf at around 590 levels.
I suspect Nvidia knows more than that. The GTX 1660 is already faster than the RX590, so they wouldn't need to boost it.
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#10
medi01
rruffI suspect Nvidia knows more than that. The GTX 1660 is already faster than the RX590, so they wouldn't need to boost it.
AMD notably skipped 5500XT, perhaps that's the trick.
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#11
QUANTUMPHYSICS
I'm just glad Nvidia is dominating the market above AMD.
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#12
bug
londisteI for one dislike it for the same reason as other Super cards - going back in power efficiency sucks.
Yeah, it's weird they managed to do that by simply swapping GDDR5 for GDDR6. But maybe I need to read more about GDDR6...
londistePrice/performance boost - even a fairly minor one - is welcome though, I suppose.
Me too.
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#13
rruff
bugYeah, it's weird they managed to do that by simply swapping GDDR5 for GDDR6. But maybe I need to read more about GDDR6...
Must have been bandwidth limited.
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#14
Turmania
at the end of the day Navi with 7nm and relatively newer tech does not come close to outperform Nvdia with its ancient tech in both performance and power consumption. Shows how far have AMD fallen behind in recent times.
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#15
bug
Turmaniaat the end of the day Navi with 7nm and relatively newer tech does not come close to outperform Nvdia with its ancient tech in both performance and power consumption. Shows how far have AMD fallen behind in recent times.
Well, the 5700 is slightly faster than the 2060 and also a little more power efficient, so Navi does close that gap (the 5700 XT is another story though). So AMD has recovered quite a lot. But it still remains to be seen what's their answer to the inevitable move of Turing to 7nm (whether it's an optical shrink or it includes other tweaks as well).

Also, Turing is not exactly ancient tech. Leaving the RT and tensor cores aside, the shaders are quite different from Pascal (not redesigned from the ground up, but redesigned nonetheless): www.anandtech.com/show/13282/nvidia-turing-architecture-deep-dive/4
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#16
rruff
Next gen AMD will be substantially different and even more competitive with Nvidia for gaming. I doubt Nvidia will fumble like Intel has with processors such that AMD actually surpasses them in most metrics, but I expect some real viable choice for a change, and that AMD will be able to sell cards with a good margin.
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#17
bug
rruffNext gen AMD will be substantially different and even more competitive with Nvidia for gaming. I doubt Nvidia will fumble like Intel has with processors such that AMD actually surpasses them in most metrics, but I expect some real viable choice for a change, and that AMD will be able to sell cards with a good margin.
I expect AMD's next gen to be Navi based.
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#18
Turmania
I hope so, i want more competition funnily enough I want Intel upcoming GPU to be a hit as well. As the above poster said I think AMD 5700 is the sweet spot. they delievered very good one at that but not the boosted ones the regular plain ones.
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#19
bug
TurmaniaI hope so, i want more competition funnily enough I want Intel upcoming GPU to be a hit as well. As the above poster said I think AMD 5700 is the sweet spot. they delievered very good one at that but not the boosted ones the regular plain ones.
Oh yes, Intel. I also hope they'll bring back solid $200-250 mid-rangers. Not that 1660 is weak or anything, but with so many other performance layers above them, it's so hard to call those cards mid-rangers...
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#20
rruff
bugI expect AMD's next gen to be Navi based.
Ya, I really have no idea how cards are designed; just remember seeing a slide show earlier this year that said they were changing something to make their cards much more power efficient (not just 7nm) and better for gaming, and that it would be two generations before they'd be fully developed.
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#21
Aquinus
Resident Wat-man
I find it interesting how a Linux review paints a slightly different picture, where the 1660 has 580-like performance on average and the 1660 SUPER is just a wee bit faster than the 590... except here, where the 590 is slower than the 1660 (at least for the MSI Gaming X review.) I'm not saying either review is wrong, I just find the difference interesting.
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#22
bug
AquinusI find it interesting how a Linux review paints a slightly different picture, where the 1660 has 580-like performance on average and the 1660 SUPER is just a wee bit faster than the 590... except here, where the 590 is slower than the 1660 (at least for the MSI Gaming X review.) I'm not saying either review is wrong, I just find the difference interesting.
The "trick" is there's no DX on Linux. Linux tests are only about OpenGL and, in some cases, Vulkan. And yes, AMD tends to fare differently in those scenarios. Navi in particular is looking way better on Linux than it does on Windows ;)
rruffYa, I really have no idea how cards are designed; just remember seeing a slide show earlier this year that said they were changing something to make their cards much more power efficient (not just 7nm) and better for gaming, and that it would be two generations before they'd be fully developed.
Marketing slides always claim the next product will be miles better that what came before it. In practice, I don't remember a single time an architecture was dropped after its first iteration. In some cases, after the first iteration a significant improvement/refinement will follow, though.
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#23
kapone32
Turmaniaat the end of the day Navi with 7nm and relatively newer tech does not come close to outperform Nvdia with its ancient tech in both performance and power consumption. Shows how far have AMD fallen behind in recent times.
12NM vsw 7nm really where is the ancient tech in that. If AMD had fallen so far behind Polaris (better power efficiency) and Navi (Better performance) would not be so successful.
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#24
Aquinus
Resident Wat-man
bugThe "trick" is there's no DX on Linux. Linux tests are only about OpenGL and, in some cases, Vulkan. And yes, AMD tends to fare differently in those scenarios. Navi in particular is looking way better on Linux than it does on Windows ;)
Totally and I'm sure that the OpenGL/Vulkan implementation on the Linux side gets more love than in Windows. What's interesting though is that a number of those benchmarked games actually are running through WINE and DXVK, like Arkham Origins and Hitman 2. Hitman 2 (via DXVK,) with the 590 is actually [slightly] faster than the 1660 SUPER in Linux via Wine and DXVK, but is far slower in Windows. Granted, it was at medium quality and it's probably running against DX11 via DXVK versus DX12 in Windows, but results like that make me really wonder.
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#25
bug
AquinusTotally and I'm sure that the OpenGL/Vulkan implementation on the Linux side gets more love than in Windows. What's interesting though is that a number of those benchmarked games actually are running through WINE and DXVK, like Arkham Origins and Hitman 2. Hitman 2 (via DXVK,) with the 590 is actually [slightly] faster than the 1660 SUPER in Linux via Wine and DXVK, but is far slower in Windows. Granted, it was at medium quality and it's probably running against DX11 via DXVK versus DX12 in Windows, but results like that make me really wonder.
It's hard to tell. For one, Nvidia is using pretty much the same driver on both Windows and Linux, whereas AMD has different drivers. And there's the emulation layer of which we know nothing about.
Other than not carrying our Windows conclusions about a GPU to Linux or the other way around, there's not much that we can meaningfully infer from those results.
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