NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Review: Smooth 1080P Gaming For Less

3DMark Time Spy is a synthetic DirectX benchmark test from Futuremark. It features a DirectX 12 engine built from the ground up to support bleeding-edge features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multithreading. Time Spy is designed to test the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards using a variety of techniques and varied visual sequences. This benchmark was developed with input from AMD, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and the other members of the Futuremark Benchmark Development Program, to showcase the performance and visual potential of graphics cards and other system resources driven by close-to-the-metal, low-overhead APIs.

3DMark Time Spy Direct X 12 Performance

In the DX12-based 3DMark Time Spy test, the EVGA and Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 cards finish in exactly the same positions, ahead of the RX 590 and GTX 1060, but behind the GeForce GTX 1070.

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike Synthetic DirectX Gaming

3DMark Fire Strike has multiple benchmark modes: Normal mode runs at 1920x1080, Extreme mode targets 2560x1440, and Ultra mode runs at a 4K resolution. GPU target frame buffer utilization for normal mode is 1GB and the benchmark uses tessellation, ambient occlusion, volume illumination, and a medium-quality depth of field filter. The more taxing Extreme mode targets 1.5GB of frame buffer memory and increases detail levels across the board. Ultra mode is explicitly designed for high-end and CrossFire / SLI systems and cranks up the quality even further. GT 1 focuses on geometry and illumination, with over 100 shadow casting spot lights, 140 non-shadow casting point lights, and 3.9 million vertices calculated for tessellation per frame. GT2 emphasizes particles and GPU simulations.

3DMark Fire Strike

In the less demanding DX11-based Fire Strike benchmark, the EVGA and Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 cards falter a bit and end up trailing the rest of the pack. We should note that we used a 6GB GTX 1060 for reference data here -- with a lower-cost 3GB model (which also has fewer texture units), the new GTX 1660s would likely have edged this one out. We're also told there's a bug with this benchmark with the 1660s that may get addressed at some point, so its possible performance will get better with a future driver update.