Strangely, this means modern games are more likely to receive a greater performance boost than titles release a number of years ago, since the former make use of more advanced and intricate shading techniques. There is a caveat though: not every video game makes use of the new Adaptive Shading with Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is the very to support the technology. I’m a big fan of these Adaptive Shading techniques, and while they may not be as exciting as the RTX features, they’re certainly more useful than the likes of ray tracing for the average gamer. In plain English, this effectively means that if any object or piece of scenery is motionless and doesn’t change in appearance for long stretches of time – like a wall or the sky for instance – the GPU smartly puts in less effort shading it every single frame. This time though, the improved efficiency comes via an algorithm that determines the shading rate according to the “spatial and colour coherence across frames”. It’s so smart it almost feels like cheating.Ĭontent Adaptive Shading is a similar technique that also provides a performance boost by alleviating the burden on the GPU. And by sacrificing such needless detail, the GPU gets a tasty performance boost in return. Think of playing a game like Forza Horizon 4 where you’re speeding through a race course – there’s little point in shading the likes of street signs and road markings in full detail when they’re nothing but a blur to the naked eye as you whizz by. This feature alters the shading rate according to the levels of motion on display. One of these techniques is called Motion Adaptive Shading. The TU116 architecture also introduces a slew of smartarse shading techniques which improve the graphics card’s efficiency by reducing the workload of the GPU without hampering the image quality. This means that while the increase in clock speed isn’t massively meaty, the improvement in efficiency should still result in a significantly superior performance. One example of this is the 1.5x boost in instructions per clock. Truth is though, most of the benefits of the new TU116 architecture aren’t visible on a spec sheet. Let’s be honest, on paper the GTX 1660 doesn’t seem like a significant upgrade to the GTX 1060. The GTX 1060 is only capable of 1708 MHz by comparison. This increase in CUDA Cores looks to be the major factor for the increase in boosted clock speeds too, with the GTX 1660 peaking at a reasonable 1785 MHz. Nvidia has found room for a bump in CUDA Cores though, with the GTX 1660 flaunting a total of 1408 compared to the GTX 1060’s 1280. The GTX 1660 and GTX 1060 share the same memory bandwidth, VRAM and even thermal design power. But unlike with the GTX 1660, Nvidia hasn’t taken full advantage of the architecture’s potential here, keeping the majority of the specs in line with the Pascal GTX 1060 in order to keep costs down. So how does the new TU116 architecture differ from Pascal?įirstly, the TU116 architecture boasts the capability for more capacity, more configurable caches and improved bandwidth. That’s no surprise given the budget price here. While the GTX 1660 is a Turing card like the RTX 2060, it lacks the latter’s special features such as ray tracing and DLSS. I chose these cards because they’re the most comparable Nvidia GPUs in terms of both price and specifications. The following table displays all the specs for the GTX 1660 and how it compares to Nvidia’s GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1060 6GB, GTX 1660 Ti, GTX 1070 and RTX 2060 graphics cards. Related: Best Graphics Cards 2019 Gigabyte GTX 1660 – Specs and technology With just a £70-odd price difference separating the two, the GTX 1660 is under a lot of pressure to deliver a comparable performance in order to be deemed a worthwhile alternative. The GTX 1660 has a very relatable issue though – the more powerful 1660 Ti is hogging the spotlight. Chuck in the exciting Turing shader innovations, which intelligently optimises the GPU’s efficiency, throw in the promise of ray tracing support in the future, and you’ve got a excellent graphics performance for a very good price. Nvidia has developed this architecture to achieve a calculated balance between performance, power and cost. Like its slightly more powerful sibling the GTX 1660 Ti, the GTX 1660 uses Nvidia’s new TU116 architecture instead of the older Pascal design used for the GTX 1050 and GTX 1060 cards. While top-tier GPUs are now hurtling past the £1000 price point, the GTX 1660 offers an impressive Full HD performance for just £199. The Gigabyte GTX 1660 is Nvidia’s new mid-range graphics card.
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