Ever since virtual reality (VR) came back to into focus of consumers there’s always been the issue of price. Back in 2016 when Oculus Rift and HTC Vive first arrived the biggest hurdle was actually having a decent enough PC to run them, which tended to be on the plus side of £1000 GBP. And one of the biggest costs was always the GPU. Move forward three years to today and that problem is fairly mute, considering NVIDIA has just released the VR-ready GeForce GTX 1660 starting from £199.
Just like the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti which was released last month, the new GeForce GTX 1660 aims to replace the GeForce GTX 1060 by offering NVIDIA’s 12th generation Turing GPU architecture, just without the Ray Tracing and Tensor Cores found in the more expensive Geforce RTX series.
Even so, thanks to the Turing architecture the new baby of the bunch has been designed to improve performance and efficiency over older Pascal models. For instance, in February’s Steam Hardware & Software Survey the fifth most popular card was the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 which came out in 2014. NVIDIA states that on average, users would see a 110% increase in performance on the GTX 960. Against Steam’s most popular card, the GeForce GTX 1060, the company says the GeForce GTX 1660 is: “on average 30% faster than the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB and 15% faster than the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB at 1080p resolution.”
NVIDIA also notes that because the GTX 1660 is 120 watts anyone who owns a GTX 960 or GTX 970 card should be able to upgrade without changing their power supply, so long as they have an 8-pin power connector.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 includes features such as support for Concurrent Floating Point and Integer Operations, a Unified Cache Architecture with larger L1 cache, and Adaptive Shading. There are 1,408 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 memory for a combined memory bandwidth of 192GB/Sec and a boost clock of almost 1.8GHz, plus overclocking potential.
NVIDIA has launched the GeForce GTX 1660 today, with the GPU available from card providers including ASUS, EVGA, Gainward, Gigabyte, Inno3D, KFA2, MSI, Palit, PNY and Zotac. Pricing starts from £199 and NVIDIA won’t be making a Founders Edition of the GPU.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of NVIDIA, reporting back with its latest announcements.