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Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti 3DMark benchmarks place it ahead of the GTX 1070

Hidden listings for a generic Nvidia GPU have today appeared in Time Spy searches, that's gotta be the GTX 1660 Ti, right?

Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti specs

Nvidia’s GTX 1660 Ti looks like it’s started popping up in the 3DMark benchmarking database, with DirectX 12 Time Spy results appearing putting it comfortably ahead of the GTX 1070 and a little behind the GTX 1070 Ti. As the release date looms ever closer the leaks are gathering pace too.

The full details of the benchmarking runs have been hidden by the users, but with a host of such results appearing today sporting the ‘Generic VGA’ title, and a leaked release date of February 22, it looks pretty likely that these are testing runs of the new Nvidia mainstream GPU.

We can’t yet say what the standard clock speed is for the release versions of the Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti, but the results posted today range from 1,770MHz up to 1,950MHz. At the bottom end of the frequency range the suspected GTX 1660 Ti scores 6,235 in Time Spy and at the top end hits 6,274. Either way, that’s ahead of our reference GTX 1070 card in the office which scores 5,974. Admittedly that’s only a 4% improvement over the old Pascal GPU, but it’s also reportedly shipping for around $100 less too.

An Amazon listing for Gigabyte’s GTX 1660 Ti appeared on the retail giant’s UK domain, giving away a host of the important specifications for Nvidia’s upcoming card and also leaking a February 22 shipping day. I think we can now be pretty confident that’s going to be the GTX 1660 Ti release date.

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The listing has now been removed, but screenshots still exist for the Gigabyte version and its triple-fan cooling array. The card was listed for £286, but that’s an overclocked version of the RTX-less Turing card, so the reference edition of the GPU should be retailing for a good deal less than that. At launch the GTX 1060’s reference, non-Founders Edition cards had an MSRP of $249, but I doubt Nvidia is going to go quite that low this time around. Other reports have put the new card’s MSRP at $279.

GTX 1660 Ti RTX 2060 GTX 1060
GPU TU116 TU106 GP106
Lithography 12nm FinFET 12nm FinFET 16nm FinFET
CUDA cores 1,536 1,920 1,280
Memory 6GB GDDR6 6GB GDDR6 6GB GDDR5
Memory bus 192-bit 192-bit 192-bit
Memory speed 12Gbps 14Gbps 8Gbps
Reference MSRP $279 $349 $249

The actual overclocked frequency isn’t shown in the remaining screenshots, but the memory clocks and architecture are front and centre. This is a 6GB GDDR6 card, with a 192-bit memory bus, and the memory listed at 12Gbps.

The images also show the card operating with a single 8-pin PCIe power connector on the top-side. Despite the smaller PCB, and cut down Turing GPU, it looks like the overclocked cards at least are going to demand some serious power from your PC.

3DMark Time Spy results

The prospective GTX 1660 Ti GPUs in the Time Spy database don’t hail from Gigabyte, however, with only MSI and Asus so far represented, alongside a single simple ‘Nvidia’ listing. They do show promising performance, however, much higher than the Pascal equivalent card in the GTX 1060, and higher again than the next GPU up the specs sheet, the GTX 1070.

That does put it some 20% short of the RTX 2060, so anyone who spent big on the lowest rung of the RTX ladder shouldn’t feel too concerned about the impending GPU release.

There have also been some Final Fantasy XV results leaked for the GTX 1660 Ti, which show a similar improvement over the GTX 1070. But we have so little faith in the FF XV benchmark we’re going to quickly gloss over those…