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GeForce GTX 1660 Ti vs GeForce GTX 1060 — how did they do it?


by Vyncent ChanFebruary 22, 2019
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NVIDIA with the launch of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti claimed up to 50% faster performance than the GeForce GTX 1060, while maintaining the same 120W TDP. But how did they achieve that? Well, with Turing’s architectural gains, faster GDDR6 VRAM, and a little magic. Less of the latter.

In general, newer games enjoy better performance gains versus the older games, as newer titles take advantage of Turing’s features. As such, the performance gains versus the GeForce GTX 1060 can range from around 15% to more than 50%.

Concurrent float and integer execution

When compared against the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB, the Turing-based GeForce GTX 1660 Ti offers more than 2x faster half-precision calculations and 25% higher single-precision performance. It also sports concurrent float and integer execution, instead of having the instructions queue up. NVIDIA takes advantage of this deliver up to 1.5x higher performance in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, as the game has an average of 38 int instructions and 62 float instructions per 100 instructions.

Adaptive Shading for Higher Performance and Same Visual Quality

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti will also be able to take advantage of Turing’s Variable Rate Shading (VRS). This allows the the card to intelligently which areas require full rate shading, and which don’t. NVIDIA will be using two algorithms for this: Motion Adaptive Shading and Content Adaptive Shading. With Motion Adaptive Shading, objects moving quickly across the screen will be rendered in lower detail for better performance.

Meanwhile in Content Adaptive Shading, the shading rate will be lowered in successive frames of the same objects, allowing for better performance. NVIDIA claims that you will not see the difference when adaptive shading is enabled. The first game to take advantage of adaptive shading is Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, where the new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti offers 150% the performance of the GeForce GTX 1060.

Unified Cache Architecture

Turing combines the L1 cache and shared cache, allowing for more higher performance regardless of your workload. The cache can be reconfigured depending on whether you need more L1 cache or shared cache, allowing there to be more hits in the faster L1 cache, thus driving up performance. NVIDIA also increased the bandwidth and lowered the latency for the unified cache over Pascal’s implementation.

Taking advantage of this technology is Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 which sees up to 50% better performance with the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti versus the GeForce GTX 1060.

Also Great for Game Streamers

One of the burgeoning career options for gamers is to be a game streamer. With the Turing architecture, NVENC has been improved to deliver higher quality streams without the CPU load that’s often the bane of streaming content. By shifting the workload to the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti’s NVENC encoder unit, you shift the weight away from the CPU’s shoulders, making 4K streaming much more feasible for most gamers.

Of course, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti will be offering NVIDIA Ansel, NVIDIA Freestyle and NVIDIA Highlights for you to share your gaming with everyone. NVIDIA claims over 3 billion captures have been made by GeForce gamers.

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is a solid mid-range card, and is definitely a great option for anyone who is looking to upgrade from older cards thanks to its Turing architecture. What do you think? Would you be getting a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti for yourself?

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Vyncent Chan

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