There has been an abundance of leaks pertaining to
NVIDIA's as-yet unannounced
GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and GeForce GTX 1660 graphics cards, and though the new GTX parts are not yet official, all of the evidence suggests they do in fact exist. If you need further convincing of this, the weekend provided it, in the form of more leaked retail box images and press renders.
We'll start with the Galax card, because it is the most interesting one of the bunch. Reddit user Rukey_Lob posted several images of the Galaxy GeForce GTX 1660 Ti packaging, including shots of the front, side, and the text on the back. While this sort of thing is not immune to Photoshopping, it is a bit more difficult than spoofing a press render.
As has been rumored, the text on the box essentially confirms these new cards are rocking a
Turing GPU.
"The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is powered by the NVIDIA Turing architecture, bringing incredible performance to the latest games. Get Game Ready with GTX," the text on the back states.
In addition, the front of the box lists "Turing Shaders" as one of the highlighted features. Assuming these are actual photos of a retail product, you can take them as confirmation that the upcoming GeForce GTX cards are indeed based on NVIDIA's latest generation Turing GPU architecture. as opposed to Pascal or something entirely new.
Leaked press renders of the same model card by Palit and EVGA state the same thing on the front of the boxes—Turing Shaders. All of the images also confirm that the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti will have 6GB of GDDR6 memory.
As we have talked about in the past, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and the non-Ti variant do not support RTX features (hence the GTX labeling), such as
real-time ray tracing and DLSS support. It's not clear if NVIDIA simply disabled the RT cores, or if it might be using a new Turing GPU that lacks RT cores altogether. Our hunch is that NVIDIA opted for the former, as it seems to make the most sense from cost and yield standpoints.
While we're still waiting on confirmation of the full specs, these cards are expected to deliver a bump in performance over Pascal, at lower price points than their GeForce RTX brethren. NVIDIA was frank about its GeForce RTX series
missing sales targets last quarter. The company alluded to sticker shock, and said that customers might also be waiting for more games to take full use the available RTX features before paying a premium for its latest generation cards.
Will the company's Turing-based GTX cards be the answer? We'll find out soon—rumor has it the new cards will launch on or around February 15.