Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14071/nvidia-gtx-1660-review-feat-evga-xc-gaming
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Review, Feat. EVGA XC GAMING: Turing Stakes Its Claim at $219
by Ryan Smith & Nate Oh on March 14, 2019 9:01 AM ESTAs NVIDIA’s carefully orchestrated rollout of its Turing family of GPUs and related video cards keeps steaming right along, we’re back again this month with the next piece in the GeForce product stack. Last month was, of course, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti; and if you know anything about NVIDIA naming then you know that NVIDIA never does a stand-alone Ti card. As a suffix indicating higher performance, if there’s a Ti card, then there needs to be a regular card as well. And today NVIDIA is delivering on just that with the vanilla GeForce GTX 1660.
For the Turing family launch, NVIDIA has been following a very straightforward top-to-bottom video card launch, and today’s GeForce GTX 1660 launch continues that pattern. With the GTX 1660 Ti coming in at the very top end of the mainstream market with a $279 price tag, NVIDIA is now ready to launch its lower-tier, more wallet-friendly $219 counterpart. This continues NVDIA’s cascade of Turing video cards down to lower prices and lower performance levels, raising the bar for video card performance at each price tier.
Turning our eyes to NVIDIA’s new card then, within the NVIDIA Turing GeForce product stack the GTX 1660 is essentially a cut-down GTX 1660 Ti, and serves as this generation’s version of the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB. Which is to say that it’s a card that uses the same GPU in a slightly cut-down configuration – in this case the same TU116 introduced for the GTX 1660 Ti – while instead making a larger tradeoff in memory in order to bring the price of the card down. Gone is GDDR6 in favor of cheaper, more widely available GDDR5, and better still you get a full 6GB of it.
Equally as important however, NVIDIA has (largely) stopped the naming shenanigans for this generation by not using memory capacity to indicate overall GPU performance. Though I’m still not a fan of suffixes (as they tend to get unintentionally cut off), this situation is massively better than the GTX 1060 naming system. So I will give credit to NVIDIA for not making the same consumer-unfriendly decision twice in a row.
Setting up today’s launch then, from a consumer standpoint the GTX 1660 may very well be the most important NVIDIA video card launch of the year. As what’s essentially NVIDIA’s $200 video card – with NVIDIA cheekily tacking another $20 on it – we’re now getting into NVIDIA’s high-volume desktop products. It’s mainstream cards like these that make up the biggest chunk of NVIDIA’s desktop shipments, so this is the card that’s going to be setting the pace for the mainstream market for the world-over. But first, let’s see if it’s any good.
NVIDIA GeForce Specification Comparison | ||||||
GTX 1660 | GTX 1660 Ti | GTX 1060 3GB | GTX 1060 6GB | |||
CUDA Cores | 1408 | 1536 | 1152 | 1280 | ||
ROPs | 48 | 48 | 48 | 48 | ||
Core Clock | 1530MHz | 1500MHz | 1506MHz | 1506MHz | ||
Boost Clock | 1785MHz | 1770MHz | 1708MHz | 1708MHz | ||
Memory Clock | 8Gbps GDDR5 | 12Gbps GDDR6 | 8Gbps GDDR5 | 8Gbps GDDR5(X) | ||
Memory Bus Width | 192-bit | 192-bit | 192-bit | 192-bit | ||
VRAM | 6GB | 6GB | 3GB | 6GB | ||
Single Precision Perf. | 5 TFLOPS | 5.5 TFLOPS | 3.9 TFLOPs | 4.4 TFLOPs | ||
"RTX-OPS" | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | ||
TDP | 120W | 120W | 120W | 120W | ||
GPU | TU116 (284 mm2) |
TU116 (284 mm2) |
GP106 (200 mm2) |
GP106 (200 mm2) |
||
Transistor Count | 6.6B | 6.6B | 4.4B | 4.4B | ||
Architecture | Turing | Turing | Pascal | Pascal | ||
Manufacturing Process | TSMC 12nm "FFN" | TSMC 12nm "FFN" | TSMC 16nm | TSMC 16nm | ||
Launch Date | 3/14/2019 | 2/22/2019 | 8/18/2016 | 7/19/2016 | ||
Launch Price | $219 | $279 | $199 | MSRP: $249 FE: $299 |
Diving into the GeForce GTX 1660’s specifications, what we find is a very familiar echo of the GTX 1660 Ti. NVIDIA is of course using the same TU116 GPU as before, making the GTX 1660 the company’s second-tier TU116 card. However rather than a fully-enabled GPU, the TU116 is slightly cut-down, shaving off 2 of the GPU’s 24 SMs, leaving 22 enabled for a total of 1408 CUDA cores.
Otherwise there are no other changes on the GPU front; in particular all of the ROPs are enabled, and clockspeeds have actually gone up just a tad, with the official boost clock rated for 1785MHz. So unlike NVIDIA’s higher-performance products where the steps in GPU configurations are much larger, the GTX 1660 family keeps things close, giving NVIDIA an avenue for salvaging chips but not creating a wide gap between them. As a result, on paper the GTX 1660 has 92% of its bigger sibling’s shading/texturing/geometry throughput, and 101% of its ROP throughput. But don’t let that fool you; how TU116 has been cut-down plays second-fiddle to the memory changes.
As I mentioned at the start of this article, like the GTX 1060 3GB before it, NVIDIA’s defining change for this card isn’t the GPU, but rather the memory. For the GTX 1060 3GB that change was tossing out half the memory, resulting in a 3GB GDDR5 card that to this day I still think was a short-sighted decision. Thankfully, for the GTX 1660 vanilla, NVIDIA is doing something different: swapping out cutting-edge GDDR6 for the tried and true backbone of the video card industry that is GDDR5. GDDR5 of course isn’t as fast as GDDR6 – and critically, this is where GTX 1660 loses a lot of its performance versus GTX 1660 Ti – but it still delivers a good amount of memory bandwidth. And better still, it means NVIDIA is shipping the card with a more appropriate 6GB of VRAM.
By the numbers then, the GTX 1660 ships with 6GB of GDDR5, which is attached via a 192-bit memory bus and operating at 8Gbps. As it so happens, this means that the GTX 1660 has exactly the same amount of memory bandwidth as the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB and 3GB; so on a generational basis, NVIDIA needs to get more performance out of the same amount of memory bandwidth.
Or, to put things within the context of the Turing generation, this is only 2/3rds the data rate of GTX 1660 Ti’s 12Gbps GDDR6, so the aggregate bandwidth reduction is significant, dropping from 288GB/sec to 192GB/sec. However as we’ll see here for the GTX 1660 – and as we’ve seen before with other video cards that ship with multiple memory speeds – video card performance scaling is far less than 1-to-1 with memory speeds. So while this causes the GTX 1660 to fall behind the GTX 1660 Ti by a decent gap, TU116 isn’t completely hamstrung by GDDR5.
Finally, to draw one last parallel to the GTX 1060 3GB, like its predecessor NVIDIA is targeting the same 120W TDP. The GTX 1060 cards all shipped with the same TDP, as it will be for the GTX 1660 cards as well. The net result is that the vanilla GTX 1660 is essentially a bit less power efficient than its Ti sibling, delivering less performance for the same power consumption. And while NVIDIA’s TDP choice is functionally arbitrary, this gives the company an outlet for marginal TU116 chips that are a little more hooked on the juice (the best chips, of course, going into laptops). The upshot is that because the GTX 1660 has fewer SMs vying for power, it means that it can boost just a bit higher, giving the card higher average clockspeeds. This also helps to keep the two GTX 1660 cards a bit closer in performance than the specs would otherwise indicate – at least when the vanilla GTX 1660 isn’t memory-bandwidth bound.
Price, Product Positioning, & The Competition
In the Pascal generation, the GTX 1060 3GB was NVIDIA’s $199 “sweet spot” video card. However like the rest of the new Turing generation, the GTX 1660 is subject to price inflation. The GTX 1660 Ti came in at $279 – which was $30 higher than before – and similarly the GTX 1660 is getting a $20 price bump to $219. This means that although NVIDIA isn’t quite hitting the sweet spot, the GTX 1660 is essentially their take on a $200 video card.
Like last month’s GTX 1660 Ti launch, today’s GTX 1660 launch is a pure virtual launch for NVIDIA and its board partners. meaning that NVIDIA is not doing any kind of retail reference card here, and all the cards hitting the shelves are customized vendor cards. In practice, expect most (if not all) of these cards to look like the GTX 1660 Ti cards that just hit the market; with the same GPU running at the same TDP, it’s quick and efficient for board vendors to reuse their designs, even with the change in memory types. TU116 is of course pin-compatible with itself, though I’m not yet sure if GDDR6 and GDDR5 can use the exact same PCBs, as the new memory has a different pin count.
NVIDIA is calling today’s launch a hard launch, though truth be told I’m not convinced it will be quite as hard of a launch as last month’s GTX 1660 Ti. We actually had to go through a few board partners before we were able to secure a sample, as other board vendors didn’t have samples available (thanks, EVGA!). So I get the distinct impression that local offices and distributors were cutting it rather close on receiving their cards ahead of today’s launch date. At any rate, by the time this article goes live, we should have a better idea of just how well-stocked this launch is.
Looking at the product stacks, within NVIDIA’s product stack this card is set to replace the GTX 1060 3GB, with the earlier GTX 1660 Ti having done the same to the GTX 1060 6GB. In practice the channel has been mostly depleted of GTX 1060 6GB cards anyhow, but whatever cards remain have just been rendered obsolete for retail purposes, as the GTX 1660 is all-around better for the same price or less. Meanwhile the remaining GTX 1060 3GB cards – which were largely under $200 to begin with – will soon face the same fate.
Otherwise, NVIDIA is once again playing this launch straight in terms of bundles. There will be no game bundles for any of the GTX 1660 series, so the value of the product is the value of the video card itself. The outgoing GTX 1060 cards on the other hand do qualify for NVIDIA’s Fortnite bundle, though it goes without saying that Fortnite is a free game to begin with.
Meanwhile in terms of intended market, like the GTX 1660 Ti before it, NVIDIA is targeting the vanilla GTX 1660 at the mainstream market, and is particularly pitching it as an upgrade from the GTX 960, GTX 760, R9 380, and other ~$200 mainstream video cards from earlier this decade. Turing cards haven’t been a true generational upgrade over their Pascal predecessors, and GTX 1660 is no different; the new card is about 28% faster than the GTX 1060 3GB it replaces.
As for NVIDIA’s loyal opposition, the launch of the GTX 1660 will continue to put pressure on AMD’s aging Polaris video cards. The GTX 1660 is faster than all of them – including the fastest RX 590 – so AMD and its board partners will have little choice but to cut prices. This means AMD can try to position their cards as spoilers to the GTX 1660 – and $219 RX 590 cards are already popping up – but they can’t take on NVIDIA in terms of performance or power efficiency. AMD will have an edge in pack-in bundles though, as they’re continuing to offer their Raise the Game Bundle, which for the RX 590 is the full, 3 game pack.
Q1 2019 GPU Pricing Comparison | |||||
AMD | Price | NVIDIA | |||
Radeon RX Vega 64 | $499 | GeForce RTX 2070 | |||
$349 | GeForce RTX 2060 | ||||
Radeon RX Vega 56* | $279 | GeForce GTX 1660 Ti | |||
Radeon RX 590 | $219 | GeForce GTX 1660 | |||
Radeon RX 580 (8GB) | $179/$189 | GeForce GTX 1060 3GB (1152 cores) |
Meet The EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 XC Black GAMING
Like last month's GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, the GeForce GTX 1660 is also a pure virtual launch, meaning it doesn't bring any Founders Edition models and leaves everything to NVIDIA’s add-in board partners. For today's reviewer, we're look at EVGA’s GeForce GTX 1660 XC Black, a 2.75-slot single-fan card with reference clocks and a slightly increased TDP of 130W. And this should all sound a little familiar; it's the same cooling design as the EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti XC Black that we took a look at last month.
GeForce GTX 1660 Card Comparison | ||||
GTX 1660 (Reference Specification) |
EVGA GTX 1660 XC Black GAMING | |||
Base Clock | 1530MHz | 1530MHz | ||
Boost Clock | 1785MHz | 1785MHz | ||
Memory Clock | 8Gbps GDDR5 | 8Gbps GDDR5 | ||
VRAM | 6GB | 6GB | ||
TDP | 120W | 130W | ||
Length | N/A | 7.48" | ||
Width | N/A | 2.75-Slot | ||
Cooler Type | N/A | Open Air | ||
Price | $219 | $219 |
To that end, there is nothing new about the design that we didn't cover last time. Utilizing technology and features first introduced with earlier RTX 20-series, the "XC" branded GTX 1660 incorporates aspects of EVGA's new iCX2 cooling design. For one, EVGA reworked their cooler design with hydraulic dynamic bearing (HDB) fans, offering lower noise and higher lifespan than sleeve and ball bearing types, and this is present in the EVGA GTX 1660 XC Black.
Like some of its older EVGA siblings, the GTX 1660 XC Black is a squat single-fan solution, complementing a longer and skinnier dual-fan version. Being so 'stubby', the one-fan GTX 1660 XC Black wields a triple-slot bracket and essentially occupies three slots due to the thick heatsink and correspondingly taller fan hub. The advantage of being so short, though, is suitability for mini-ITX form factors.
And unsurprisingly, considering that the GTX 1660 Ti XC Black lacked this feature, the GTX 1660 XC Black does not feature LEDs and zero-dB fan capability, where fans turn off completely at low idle temperatures. The former is an eternal matter of taste, as opposed to the practicality of the latter, but both tend to be perks of premium models and/or higher-end GPUs.
The output situation also holds no surprises, though partners ultimately can opt for what they'd like here. The GTX 1660 XC Black goes for a standard mainstream card configuration with 1x DisplayPort/1x HDMI/1x DVI and not including a USB-C/VirtualLink output. Although the TU116 GPU still supports VirtualLink, the decision to implement it is up to partners; the feature is less applicable for cards further down the stack, where cards are more sensitive to cost and are less likely to be used for VR. Additionally, the 30W USB-C controller power budget could be significant amount relative to the overall TDP.
And on the topic of power, the GTX 1660 XC Black’s power limit is capped at the default 130W like the GTX 1660 Ti XC Black, though theoretically the card’s single 8-pin PCIe power connector could supply 150W on its own.
The rest of the other GPU-tweaking knobs are there for your overclocking needs, and for EVGA this goes hand-in-hand with Precision, their overclocking utility. For NVIDIA’s Turing cards, EVGA released Precision X1, which allows modifying the voltage-frequency curve and scanning for auto-overclocking as part of Turing’s GPU Boost 4. Of course, NVIDIA’s restriction of actual overvolting is still in place, and for Turing there is a cap at 1.068v.
A final note is EVGA's new 'Associates' referral/rewards program, which launched just this month. EVGA Elite members can offer referral codes, which will provide the buyer a discount, and the referring member a 3-5% cut in the form of EVGA Bucks.
The Test
Without any Founders Edition, NVIDIA is pushing out the GTX 1660 as a fully custom launch, and while the EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 XC Black has reference clocks, the TDP is set at 130W rather than the reference 120W. To keep testing and analysis as apples-to-apples as possible, as usual we've emulated reference GTX 1660 specifications. While not perfect, this should be reasonably accurate for a virtual reference card as we look at reference-to-reference comparisons.
Test Setup | |||||
CPU | Intel Core i7-7820X @ 4.3GHz | ||||
Motherboard | Gigabyte X299 AORUS Gaming 7 (F9g) | ||||
PSU | Corsair AX860i | ||||
Storage | OCZ Toshiba RD400 (1TB) | ||||
Memory | G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3200 4 x 8GB (16-18-18-38) |
||||
Case | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition | ||||
Monitor | LG 27UD68P-B | ||||
Video Cards | EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 XC Black NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 AMD Radeon RX 590 AMD Radeon RX 580 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 Founders Edtion NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (2GB) |
||||
Video Drivers | NVIDIA Release 419.15 (Press) AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.3.1 |
||||
OS | Windows 10 x64 Pro (1803) Spectre and Meltdown Patched |
As an additional thanks to EVGA, we were also able to get a GeForce GTX 1060 3GB card, which is the closest last-gen predecessor given that the GTX 1660 is directly replacing the GTX 1060 3GB.
In the same vein, for Ashes, GTA V, F1 2018, and Shadow of War, we've updated some of the benchmark automation and data processing steps, so results may vary at the 1080p mark compared to previous GPU 2018 data of last year.
Battlefield 1 (DX11)
Battlefield 1 returns from the 2017 benchmark suite, the 2017 benchmark suite with a bang as DICE brought gamers the long-awaited AAA World War 1 shooter a little over a year ago. With detailed maps, environmental effects, and pacy combat, Battlefield 1 provides a generally well-optimized yet demanding graphics workload. The next Battlefield game from DICE, Battlefield V, completes the nostalgia circuit with a return to World War 2, but more importantly for us, is one of the flagship titles for GeForce RTX real time ray tracing.
We use the Ultra preset is used with no alterations. As these benchmarks are from single player mode, our rule of thumb with multiplayer performance still applies: multiplayer framerates generally dip to half our single player framerates. Battlefield 1 also supports HDR (HDR10, Dolby Vision).
As a mainstream card, the GTX 1660 is aiming at the area between RX 580/590 and GTX 1660 Ti, and that's exactly where it lines up in Battlefield 1. In fact, it's also the only game this suite that the RX 590 can make a claim to have a slight lead, albeit at 1440p. Ideally, given the original $279 MSRP of the RX 590, this is the level of performance the GTX 1660 wants to meet, where it undercuts the RX 590 and beats out the RX 580 for a competitive price.
And unsurprisingly, the mild +10W TDP of the EVGA XC Black makes an equally mild difference, just like last time.
Far Cry 5 (DX11)
The latest title in Ubisoft's Far Cry series lands us right into the unwelcoming arms of an armed militant cult in Montana, one of the many middles-of-nowhere in the United States. With a charismatic and enigmatic adversary, gorgeous landscapes of the northwestern American flavor, and lots of violence, it is classic Far Cry fare. Graphically intensive in an open-world environment, the game mixes in action and exploration.
Far Cry 5 does support Vega-centric features with Rapid Packed Math and Shader Intrinsics. Far Cry 5 also supports HDR (HDR10, scRGB, and FreeSync 2). This testing was done without HD Textures enabled, an option that was recently patched in.
For Far Cry 5, we see the same story, where the GTX 1660 is matching RX 590 performance, meaning that it is comfortably ahead of the RX 580 and GTX 1060 3GB. As for the very close results of the GTX 1660 at reference specifications and at 130W, compared to the RX 590, Far Cry 5 is not one to show granular differences, due to how the developers implemented the built-in benchmark reporting. But for all intents and purposes, the matchup is a wash here.
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation (DX12)
A veteran from both our 2016 and 2017 game lists, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation remains the DirectX 12 trailblazer, with developer Oxide Games tailoring and designing the Nitrous Engine around such low-level APIs. The game makes the most of DX12's key features, from asynchronous compute to multi-threaded work submission and high batch counts. And with full Vulkan support, Ashes provides a good common ground between the forward-looking APIs of today. Its built-in benchmark tool is still one of the most versatile ways of measuring in-game workloads in terms of output data, automation, and analysis; by offering such a tool publicly and as part-and-parcel of the game, it's an example that other developers should take note of.
Settings and methodology remain identical from its usage in the 2016 GPU suite. To note, we are utilizing the original Ashes Extreme graphical preset, which compares to the current one with MSAA dialed down from x4 to x2, as well as adjusting Texture Rank (MipsToRemove in settings.ini).
We've updated some of the benchmark automation and data processing steps, so results may vary at the 1080p mark compared to previous data from last year.
With Ashes, the GTX 1660 edges out the RX 590, but at a decent distance from the GTX 1660 Ti. And like how Ashes offered the least amount of improvement in the suite for the GTX 1660 Ti over the GTX 1060 6GB, this also offers the least amount of improvement for the GTX 1660 over the GTX 1060 6GB and 3GB. Nevertheless, it still slightly outpaces the RX 590.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus (Vulkan)
id Software is popularly known for a few games involving shooting stuff until it dies, just with different 'stuff' for each one: Nazis, demons, or other players while scorning the laws of physics. Wolfenstein II is the latest of the first, the sequel of a modern reboot series developed by MachineGames and built on id Tech 6. While the tone is significantly less pulpy nowadays, the game is still a frenetic FPS at heart, succeeding DOOM as a modern Vulkan flagship title and arriving as a pure Vullkan implementation rather than the originally OpenGL DOOM.
Featuring a Nazi-occupied America of 1961, Wolfenstein II is lushly designed yet not oppressively intensive on the hardware, something that goes well with its pace of action that emerge suddenly from a level design flush with alternate historical details.
The highest quality preset, "Mein leben!", was used. Wolfenstein II also features Vega-centric GPU Culling and Rapid Packed Math, as well as Radeon-centric Deferred Rendering; in accordance with the preset, neither GPU Culling nor Deferred Rendering was enabled.
As we've seen before, Turing and Vega tend to run well on Wolfenstein II. For our games, these results are the only other title where the RX 590 is at least even with the GTX 1660. Meanwhile, the GTX 1060 3GB stumbles for want of VRAM, especially in the 99th percentiles. To that end, the GTX 1660 is more than 3X the performance of the GTX 1060 3GB, but also well ahead of the GTX 1060 6GB by 35% or more.
Final Fantasy XV (DX11)
Upon arriving to PC earlier this, Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition was given a graphical overhaul as it was ported over from console, fruits of their successful partnership with NVIDIA, with hardly any hint of the troubles during Final Fantasy XV's original production and development.
In preparation for the launch, Square Enix opted to release a standalone benchmark that they have since updated. Using the Final Fantasy XV standalone benchmark gives us a lengthy standardized sequence to utilize OCAT. Upon release, the standalone benchmark received criticism for performance issues and general bugginess, as well as confusing graphical presets and performance measurement by 'score'. In its original iteration, the graphical settings could not be adjusted, leaving the user to the presets that were tied to resolution and hidden settings such as GameWorks features.
Since then, Square Enix has patched the benchmark with custom graphics settings and bugfixes to be more accurate in profiling in-game performance and graphical options, though leaving the 'score' measurement. For our testing, we enable or adjust settings to the highest except for NVIDIA-specific features and 'Model LOD', the latter of which is left at standard. Final Fantasy XV also supports HDR, and it will support DLSS at some later date.
Final Fantasy V is another strong title for NVIDIA across the board, and the GTX 1660 is in a very comfortable slot between the GTX 1660 Ti and RX 590. The GTX 1060 6GB lost out to the RX 590 here, but here the GTX 1660 overtakes the RX 590. By the looks of the 99th percentiles, the GTX 1060 3GB is clearly struggling with its limited 3GB framebuffer at 1440p.
Grand Theft Auto V (DX11)
Now a truly venerable title, GTA V is a veteran of past game suites that is still graphically demanding as they come. As an older DX11 title, it provides a glimpse into the graphically intensive games of yesteryear that don't incorporate the latest features. Originally released for consoles in 2013, the PC port came with a slew of graphical enhancements and options. Just as importantly, GTA V includes a rather intensive and informative built-in benchmark, somewhat uncommon in open-world games.
The settings are identical to its previous appearances, which are custom as GTA V does not have presets. To recap, a "Very High" quality is used, where all primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, except grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced rendering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but not increasing the view distance any further.
We've updated some of the benchmark automation and data processing steps, so results may vary at the 1080p mark compared to previous data.
Overall, NVIDIA hardware tends to perform well on GTA, and the GTX 1660 is no exception. Here, the GTX 1660 is not significantly ahead of the GTX 1060 6GB and 3GB. Nevertheless, it's well in front of the RX 590, being closer to the level of the RX Vega 56.
Middle-earth: Shadow of War (DX11)
Next up is Middle-earth: Shadow of War, the sequel to Shadow of Mordor. Developed by Monolith, whose last hit was arguably F.E.A.R., Shadow of Mordor returned them to the spotlight with an innovative NPC rival generation and interaction system called the Nemesis System, along with a storyline based on J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium, and making it work on a highly modified engine that originally powered F.E.A.R. in 2005.
Using the new LithTech Firebird engine, Shadow of War improves on the detail and complexity, and with free add-on high resolution texture packs, offers itself as a good example of getting the most graphics out of an engine that may not be bleeding edge. Shadow of War also supports HDR (HDR10).
We've updated some of the benchmark automation and data processing steps, so results may vary at the 1080p mark compared to previous data.
The GTX 1060 3GB starts to lag behind in this game, where the GTX 1660 takes a substantial lead. In turn, the GTX 1660 is solidly above the GTX 1060 6GB, along with the RX 580.
F1 2018 (DX11)
Succeeding F1 2016 is F1 2018, Codemaster's latest iteration in their official Formula One racing games. It features a slimmed down version of Codemasters' traditional built-in benchmarking tools and scripts, something that is surprisingly absent in DiRT 4.
Aside from keeping up-to-date on the Formula One world, F1 2017 added HDR support, which F1 2018 has maintained; otherwise, we should see any newer versions of Codemasters' EGO engine find its way into F1. Graphically demanding in its own right, F1 2018 keeps a useful racing-type graphics workload in our benchmarks.
We've updated some of the benchmark automation and data processing steps, so results may vary at the 1080p mark compared to previous data. Notably, for F1 2018 this includes calculating 99th percentiles from raw frame time output.
F1 is another good showing for the GTX 1660, with a meaningful uplift over the Pascal GTX 1060s as well as the Polaris offerings.
Total War: Warhammer II (DX11)
Last in our 2018 game suite is Total War: Warhammer II, built on the same engine of Total War: Warhammer. While there is a more recent Total War title, Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia, that game was built on the 32-bit version of the engine. The first TW: Warhammer was a DX11 game was to some extent developed with DX12 in mind, with preview builds showcasing DX12 performance. In Warhammer II, the matter, however, appears to have been dropped, with DX12 mode still marked as beta, but also featuring performance regression for both vendors.
It's unfortunate because Creative Assembly themselves have acknowledged the CPU-bound nature of their games, and with re-use of game engines as spin-offs, DX12 optimization would have continued to provide benefits, especially if the future of graphics in RTS-type games will lean towards low-level APIs.
There are now three benchmarks with varying graphics and processor loads; we've opted for the Battle benchmark, which appears to be the most graphics-bound.
Rounding out our look at game performance is Total War: Warhammer II. Here, the GTX 1660 is a neat split between the GTX 1060 6GB/RX 590 and the GTX 1660 Ti.
Compute & Synthetics
Shifting gears, we'll look at the compute and synthetic aspects of the GTX 1660.
Beginning with CompuBench 2.0, the latest iteration of Kishonti's GPU compute benchmark suite offers a wide array of different practical compute workloads, and we’ve decided to focus on level set segmentation, optical flow modeling, and N-Body physics simulations.
Moving on, we'll also look at single precision floating point performance with FAHBench, the official Folding @ Home benchmark. Folding @ Home is the popular Stanford-backed research and distributed computing initiative that has work distributed to millions of volunteer computers over the internet, each of which is responsible for a tiny slice of a protein folding simulation. FAHBench can test both single precision and double precision floating point performance, with single precision being the most useful metric for most consumer cards due to their low double precision performance.
Next is Geekbench 4's GPU compute suite. A multi-faceted test suite, Geekbench 4 runs seven different GPU sub-tests, ranging from face detection to FFTs, and then averages out their scores via their geometric mean. As a result Geekbench 4 isn't testing any one workload, but rather is an average of many different basic workloads.
In lieu of Blender, which has yet to officially release a stable version with CUDA 10 support, we have the LuxRender-based LuxMark (OpenCL) and V-Ray (OpenCL and CUDA).
We'll also take a quick look at tessellation performance.
Finally, for looking at texel and pixel fillrate, we have the Beyond3D Test Suite. This test offers a slew of additional tests – many of which we use behind the scenes or in our earlier architectural analysis – but for now we’ll stick to simple pixel and texel fillrates.
Power, Temperature, and Noise
As always, we'll take a look at power, temperature, and noise of the GTX 1660, though after having seen the GTX 1660 Ti in a similar if not identical design, we aren't expecting anything out of the ordinary. As mentioned earlier, we've seen the XC Black board with the GTX 1660 Ti not too long ago.
Using the same TU116 GPU as the GTX 1660 Ti, the voltages are unsurprisingly the same.
NVIDIA GeForce Video Card Voltages | ||
Model | Boost | Idle |
GeForce GTX 1660 | 1.037V | 0.656V |
GeForce GTX 1660 Ti | 1.037V | 0.656V |
GeForce RTX 2060 | 1.025v | 0.725v |
GeForce GTX 1060 6GB | 1.043v | 0.625v |
As for clockspeeds, the same broad points from the GTX 1660 Ti review apply. Clocks at +10W TDP and at reference 120W TDP are only slightly altered, and the trend of NVIDIA's conservative boost estimates continues.
GeForce Video Card Average Clockspeeds | |||||
Game | GTX 1660 | EVGA GTX 1660 XC |
GTX 1660 Ti | GTX 1060 6GB | |
Max Boost Clock |
2160MHz
|
2160MHz |
2160MHz
|
1898MHz
|
|
Boost Clock | 1830MHz | 1830MHz | 1770MHz | 1708MHz | |
Battlefield 1 | 1880MHz | 1885MHz | 1888MHz | 1855MHz | |
Far Cry 5 | 1889MHz | 1897MHz | 1903MHz | 1855MHz | |
Ashes: Escalation | 1874MHz | 1872MHz | 1871MHz | 1837MHz | |
Wolfenstein II | 1832MHz | 1861MHz | 1825MHz | 1835MHz | |
Final Fantasy XV | 1865MHz | 1869MHz | 1855MHz | 1850MHz | |
GTA V | 1894MHz | 1898MHz | 1901MHz | 1872MHz | |
Shadow of War | 1879MHz | 1882MHz | 1860MHz | 1861MHz | |
F1 2018 | 1880MHz | 1886MHz | 1877MHz | 1865MHz | |
Total War: Warhammer II | 1890MHz | 1893MHz | 1908MHz | 1875MHz |
Compared to the official average boost clock of the GTX 1660 Ti, the differences are also minor.
Power Consumption
Meanwhile when it comes to idle power consumption, the GTX 1660 falls in line with everything else at 83W. With contemporary desktop cards, idle power has reached the point where nothing short of low-level testing can expose what these cards are drawing.
All told, NVIDIA has very good and very consistent power control here. and it remains one of their key advantages over AMD, and key strengths in keeping their OEM customers happy.
Temperature
Noise
Turning again to EVGA's card, despite being a custom open air design, the GTX 1660 XC Black doesn't come with 0db idle capabilties and features a single smaller but higher-RPM fan. The default fan curve puts the minimum at 33%, which is indicative that EVGA has tuned the card for cooling over acoustics. But the curve is a little more forgiving at higher temperatures, and doesn't ramp up as much, reducing their noise levels significantly from the Ti XC Black.
Overclocking
Last, but not least, we'll take a look at overclocking. While NVIDIA does support overclocking, they have limited actual overvolting, and instead providing the ability to unlock 1-2 more boost bins and associated voltages. Either way, Maxwell 2 and Pascal certainly have much to thank for high clockspeeds; for Maxwell 2, it was a combination of high efficiency and ample overclocking headroom, while Pascal took advantage of the FinFET process to ramp up the clocks to new heights.
A total of four different overclocks were tested via EVGA's Precision X1; unfortunately, we were not able to get the auto OC scanning functionality to fully work. First was a baseline, consisting of 100% overvoltage and max temperature limits; power limit is already set to a soft cap of 130W at stock. The second was overclocking the GDDR5 memory by 1Gbps. The third was overclocking the GPU by +100MHz; in practice, observed clocks were in the mid 1900MHz. Lastly, all previous adjustments were combined for an overall overclock.
GeForce GTX 1660 Overclocking | ||||||
Baseline | Memory OC | GPU OC | All OC | |||
Core Clock | 1530MHz | 1530MHz | 1530MHz | 1530MHz | ||
Boost Clock | 1785MHz | 1785MHz | 1885MHz | 1885MHz | ||
Memory Clock | 8Gbps | 9Gbps (+250MHz) | 8Gbps | 9Gbps (+250MHz) |
Naturally, these results cannot be taken as representative of all GTX 1660 cards, but results here can offer some insight.
Final Words
Today’s launch of the GeForce GTX 1660 marks what is now the 6th member of NVIDIA’s Turing architecture GeForce product stack. At this point NVIDIA should be nearing the end of their launch cycle – traditionally, at least, only potential xx50 cards remain – and in tried and true top-to-bottom fashion, NVIDIA has saved some of their most important, highest volume products for the back-end of the launch cycle. As the 6th Turing video card reviewed, the GeForce GTX 1660 doesn’t come with any new surprises, but it is (once again) a well-executed launch for the company that keeps rolling out Turing technology into progressively cheaper video cards.
With last month’s launch of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti – NVIDIA’s premium take on the GTX 1660 family – NVIDIA more or less dipped its toes into the mainstream market The $279 was fast for the price and well ahead of the cards it was meant to replace, but the biggest play in the consumer video card market has normally been around the $200 mark, not the $300 mark. So at $219, the GTX 1660 may very well be the most important launch for NVIDIA within the entire desktop product stack, as its destined to become a high-volume workhorse of the GeForce family.
For consumers looking at video cards priced in the $200-$250 range then, the GeForce GTX 1660 sets a new bar for performance and power efficiency. By the numbers, the GTX 1660 delivers around 28% better performance than the GTX 1060 3GB it formally replaces – and more performance still if we start factoring in games where that card was greatly held back by its undersized 3GB memory pool. Or, looking at older 28nm mainstream cards like the GTX 960 and the R9 280 that the GTX 1660 is better suited to upgrade to, the GTX 1660 is ahead by around 2x.
Overall, these performance gains are right on target for what we’d expect from a cut-down TU116 card. Relative to the lead member of the GTX 1660 family, the GTX 1660 Ti, the new GTX 1660 is only 14% slower. Some of this performance cut is due to the cut-down GPU, but more of it comes from the use of slower GDDR5 memory in place of cutting-edge GDDR6. Thankfully, Turing is resilient even in the face of more limited memory bandwidth, and of all the ways NVIDIA has segmented their mainstream products, this is one of the better ways they’ve done it. Unlike the GTX 1060 series, NVIDIA thankfully isn’t playing any games in terms of memory size, so the GTX 1660 is about as future-proof as its older sibling.
As for the competition, as has been the case with all of our other Turing video card launches, the architecture and 12nm process have helped vault NVIDIA to the top. With that said, however, the GTX 1660 is far enough behind the GTX 1660 Ti that the tail-end of NVIDIA’s lineup is no longer leaving AMD in the dust. on average, the GTX 1660 is just 7% ahead of the Radeon RX 590, which is a non-trivial gap but also not a clear tier ahead of AMD’s fastest Polaris video card.
The difference in power efficiency, on the other hand, is just as brutal for AMD as you might expect; GTX 1660 is a bit faster at half the power consumption. RX 590 was designed to take down GTX 1060 6GB at any cost, which it did. But the GTX 1660 launch means that AMD has lost any performance advantage. Still, I won’t be too surprised if AMD keeps the RX 590 around as their GTX 1660 competitor for the rest of this spring, especially if they opt to keep up the game bundles as well.
Looking at the bigger picture, NVIDIA’s xx60 cards have for the last few generations been pitched at the 1080p market, and the GTX 1660 slots into this mindset as well. All throughout our testing, the GTX 1660 had no trouble keeping framerates up even with even our highest image quality settings; only on a single game did it average less than 60fps, and that was on the latest Total War strategy game. Meanwhile at the other end of things, the GTX 1660 actually had enough performance deliver 60fp or better even at 1440p. So while this isn’t a card grossly overpowered for 1080p, it’ll serve 1080p gamers well with a bit of headroom to spare.
As a result of all of these factors, the launch of the GTX 1660 secures NVIDIA’s control of the mainstream video card market, at least for now. The fact that the card isn’t at $199 may yet cost NVIDIA some sales to cheap RX 580 cards – consumers as a whole are somewhat fickle about prices, which is why we have $199 cards instead of $200 cards to begin with – but in terms of performance and power efficiency, the GTX 1660 is unmatched.
Speaking of efficiency, as this was popular in our GeForce GTX 1660 Ti review, I’m going to bring back the Turing versus Pascal performance and positioning chart.
GeForce: Turing versus Pascal | ||||||
List Price (Turing) |
Relative Performance | Relative Price |
Relative Perf-Per-Dollar |
|||
RTX 2080 Ti vs GTX 1080 Ti | $999 | +32% | +42% | -7% | ||
RTX 2080 vs GTX 1080 | $699 | +35% | +40% | -4% | ||
RTX 2070 vs GTX 1070 | $499 | +35% | +32% | +2% | ||
RTX 2060 vs GTX 1060 6GB | $349 | +59% | +40% | +14% | ||
GTX 1660 Ti vs GTX 1060 6GB | $279 | +36% | +12% | +21% | ||
GTX 1660 vs GTX 1060 3GB | $219 | +28% | +10% | +16% |
Overall, the perf-per-dollar increase for GTX 1660 versus the GTX 1060 3GB isn’t quite as large as what we saw with the GTX 1660 Ti. However I should also note that I’m using our 28% performance improvement figure here, which excludes Wolfenstein 2, a game the VRAM-limited 3GB card chokes badly on. That game is such an outlier that, if it’s factored in, it drags the average performance improvement up to 47%. Which though impressive, is hardly common. Either way, however, the importance of VRAM capacity is definitely a factor as we start approaching $200 video cards; these cards tend to be at the tail end of the VRAM capacities required to run games without compromising on lower quality textures and other assets.
Last, but not least, we have the matter of EVGA’s GeForce GTX 1660 XC Black GAMING. As this is launch without reference cards, we’re going to see NVIDIA’s board partners hit the ground running with their custom cards. And in true EVGA tradition, their XC Black GAMING is a solid example of what to expect for a $219 baseline GTX 1660 card.
As it happens, this is the same model card we reviewed for the GTX 1660 Ti launch, with the card updated to use NVIDIA’s latest GPU + memory configuration. Meaning it uses the same board and 2.75-slot cooler as its premium Ti counterpart. So GTX 1660 aside, our thoughts are pretty much unchanged on the design.
I have to admit a triple-slot cooler is an odd choice for a 130W card – a standard double-wide card would have been more than sufficient for that kind of TDP – but in a market that’s going to be full of single and dual fan cards it definitely stands out from the crowd; and quite literally so, thanks to its height. Meanwhile I’m not sure there’s much to be said about EVGA’s software that we haven’t said a dozen times before: in EVGA Precision remains some of the best overclocking software on the market. And with such a beefy cooler on this card, it’s certainly begging to be overclocked.
Past that, EVGA’s slightly higher 130W TDP has roughly the same effect on the GTX 1660 as it did on the GTX 1660 Ti, moving performance by only 1%. This isn’t a factory overclocked card – EVGA just gives it a bit more headroom – so it’s a solid indictor that the GTX 1660 isn’t any more TDP-limited than its predecessor. If you want to put more of that TDP headroom to good use, EVGA will of course be glad to sell you a factory overclocked card as well, but I'd argue it’s a lot more fun to do the overclocking yourself, especially as it's a good excuse to take advantage of Turing’s overclocking scanner features.