We’ve heard plenty of rumors that Nvidia plans to announce a new GTX 11-series of graphics cards, but this is the first time we’re hearing about a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti.
Apparently, such an oddly-named card is indeed in the works. We say 'oddly-named', as it doesn't seem to follow Nvidia's previous naming conventions, as to date we've seen the GTX 660, GTX 760, GTX 960 and GTX 1060. Surely there would be some logic to Nvidia jumping to GTX 1660 Ti, unless the rumor is incorrect and the more likely GTX 1160 Ti name is in fact used.
Apparently, the graphics card will feature a TU116 GPU with 1,536 CUDA cores and 6GB of GDDR6, according to three sources that spoke with Videocardz. The GDDR6 memory is particularly interesting, as it comes with higher bandwidth than the previous GTX 1060 enjoyed, making it a potentially much more capable graphics card.
What do the specs mean?
The TU116 GPU is part of Nvidia's recent Turing architecture, using the same 12nm FinFET manufacturing process which is used for the RTX 2060, but it has fewer CUDA cores compared to the 1,920 count found on the Nvidia RTX 2060. According to VideoCardz's sources, this is because Nvidia doesn't want the GTX 1160 Ti to compete with the RTX 2060. Plus, it would still technically be an upgrade over the Nvidia GTX 1060 and its 1,280 CUDA Cores.
This GTX 1660 Ti is also said to not include any RTX cores – there’s no word on whether Tensor Cores (which Nvidia claims helps with deep learning applications) have been dropped as well, as a cost-cutting measure for users who don’t want to spend the premium on ray-traced graphics.
Around the launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060, there was heated speculation that a Geforce GTX 1160 card would also be announced, so these rumors about a GTX 1660 seem a bit odd.
While this rumor seems to be standing on shaky ground, it seems certain that Nvidia will have to announce more affordable graphics cards to replace its outgoing 10-series Pascal graphics cards. Whether it takes shape in a RTX-less 11- or 16-series, or the hotly anticipated RTX 2050 (Ti), remains to be seen.
- Meanwhile in processor land, the AMD's first Ryzen 3000 chip look very exciting
Via Wccftech
