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

Name: GeForce GTX 1660
Brand: GeForce

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, March 14, 2019, 09:00 AM EDT

Monolith’s surprisingly fun Orc-slaying title Middle Earth: Shadow of War, delivers a ton of visual fidelity even at its lower quality settings. So, to maximize the eye-candy on these high-end graphics cards, we used the game’s Ultra quality preset and ran the benchmark routine at a couple of resolutions, topping out at 4K -- or, excuse us, 3840x2160 for the sticklers out there. All of the game's graphics-related options were enabled, along with Temporal AA and Camera Blur. We should note this is the latest installment in the successful game series and our review of Shadow of War is right here, if you'd like to catch up on the happenings in Middle Earth.

Middle Earth: Shadow of War Performance

Glorious Orc-Slaying Action

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War

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We saw a somewhat different performance trend in Shadow Of War. Here, the Radeon RX 590 jumps up a few rungs, and the GeForce GTX 1660 cards end up trailing. The new GTX 1660 cards, however, have no trouble dispatching the GeForce GTX 1060.

The frame and render time data shows the GeForce GTX 1660 cards churning through Shadow Of War significantly faster than the GTX 1060, but they can't quite catch the higher-end, and higher-priced, cards.

F1 2018

DirectX 11 Gaming Performance

F1 2018 is Codemaster’s latest Formula One racing simulation, and like previous version of the game, it sports impressive visuals with DX11 support (though a DX12 code path is currently in beta). We tested the game configured with its Ultra graphics preset, but with SSRT shadows enabled at resolutions of 1920x1080 and 2560x1440 with temporal anti-aliasing enabled.

F1 2018

Performance with F1 2018 is more in-line with all of the other tests we've run up to this point. The new GeForce GTX 1660 cards from EVGA and Gigabyte outpace the Radeon RX 590 and the GeForce GTX 1060 at both resolutions, and offer better minimum and average frame rates.

The frame time data jibes with the average framerates and shows the GeForce GTX 1660 card outrunning the Radeon RX 590 and GeForce GTX 1060.

Tags: Nvidia, GeForce, Gigabyte, GPU, evga, (nasdaq:nvda), turing, geforce gtx 1660

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com