A report from HardOCP could be shedding a floodlight-like amount of details on NVIDIA's lineup plans for the lower end, and their current generation of Turing videocards. The site, citing industry sources, claims that NVIDIA's GTX 1660 Ti, which has been shown to improve upon NVIDIA's previous-gen GTX 1060 by some 16%, is reported to gon on sale at a previously reported sub-$300 pricing of $279 (lower than the skeptically expected $299). This graphics card is expected to go on sale as early as February 15th.

Other details that shore up information on NVIDIA's plans include the purported early March launch of the slightly slower GTX 1660, which will see its pricing cut down to $229, and the much slower GTX 1650 later on that same month, for $179. Expect performance reviews from your favorite hardware website on the galaxy when those do come out (Commander Shepard would be proud of this endorsement).

Thai PC enthusiast TUM Apisak posted a screenshot of an alleged GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS) benchmark. The GTX 1660 Ti, if you'll recall, is an upcoming graphics card based on the TU116 silicon, which is a derivative of the "Turing" architecture but with a lack of real-time raytracing capabilities. Tested on a machine powered by an Intel Core i9-9900K processor, the AoTS benchmark was set to run at 1080p and DirectX 11. At this resolution, the GTX 1660 Ti returned a score of 7,400 points, which roughly compares with the previous-generation GTX 1070, and is about 16-17 percent faster than the GTX 1060 6 GB. NVIDIA is expected to launch the GTX 1660 Ti some time in Spring-Summer, 2019, as a sub-$300 successor to the GTX 1060 series.

It looks like RTX technology won't make it to sub-$250 market segments as the GPUs aren't fast enough to handle real-time raytracing, and it makes little economic sense for NVIDIA to add billions of additional transistors for RT cores. The company is hence carving out a sub-class of "Turing" GPUs under the TU11x ASIC series, which will power new GeForce GTX family SKUs, such as the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, and other GTX 1000-series SKUs. These chips offer "Turing Shaders," which are basically CUDA cores that have the IPC and clock-speeds rivaling existing "Turing" GPUs, but no RTX capabilities. To sweeten the deal, NVIDIA will equip these cards with GDDR6 memory. These GPUs could still have tensor cores which are needed to accelerate DLSS, a feature highly relevant to this market segment.

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti will no doubt be slower than the RTX 2060, and be based on a new ASIC codenamed TU116. According to a VideoCardz report, this 12 nm chip packs 1,536 CUDA cores based on the "Turing" architecture, and the same exact memory setup as the RTX 2060, with 6 GB of GDDR6 memory across a 192-bit wide memory interface. The lack of RT cores and a lower CUDA core count could make the TU116 a significantly smaller chip than the TU106, and something NVIDIA can afford to sell at sub-$300 price-points such as $250. The GTX 1060 6 GB is holding the fort for NVIDIA in this segment, besides other GTX 10-series SKUs such as the GTX 1070 occasionally dropping below the $300 mark at retailers' mercy. AMD recently improved its sub-$300 portfolio with the introduction of Radeon RX 590, which convincingly outperforms the GTX 1060 6 GB.