Nvidia GTX 1660 Super vs. GTX 1660 Ti vs. GTX 1660

For all the focus on Nvidia’s new high-end RTX 3000 cards, there are still plenty of great affordable graphics cards in the GTX 16-series. That’s great news for getting the most for your money, but it can make choosing the right GPU a little confusing. To make sure you get the best bang-for-buck card for you, we’ve taken a look at each of Nvidia’s GTX 1660 GPUs and pitted them in a head to head: GTX 1660 Ti versus GTX 1660 Super versus GTX 1660.

If you want to consider other GPUs too, check out our guide to the best graphics cards, whatever your budget. That might be a good idea if you’re in the market to build a computer now, too, as stock shortages have pushed many of Nvidia’s 16-series cards off the shelves.

Pricing and availability

The Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti was the first of Nvidia’s GTX 16-series — an entry-level alternative to its RTX graphics range and a replacement for its more modest GTX 10-series cards. It lacked the higher CUDA core counts, RT and Tensor cores, and expansive feature sets of the RTX cards but was based on the same Turing 12nm architecture. It debuted on February 22, 2019, and was followed shortly after on March 14 by the GTX 1660, a card with fewer CUDA cores and slower memory.

The Nvidia GTX 1660 Super launched on October 29, 2019, and was designed to sit in between the two existing 1660 cards in both price and performance.

As Nvidia pushes ahead with its RTX 30-series GPUs, the remaining stock of 16-series cards is all but spoken for. If you can find a 16-series GPU in stock, you’ll usually pay around twice its MSRP — around $400. At that price, Nvidia’s RTX 3060 Ti is a much better option, and if you want to save even more, the upcoming RTX 3060 looks promising, too.

Both of those cards are more expensive than any of the 16-series cards. However, we’ll see more plentiful 3060 Ti and 3060 stock over the next few months, and we don’t imagine restocks for 16-series cards are high on the list of priorities for Nvidia.

Performance

The GTX 1660 cards aren’t hugely distinct in terms of performance, but some offer greater bang for buck than others.

When the GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti debuted in early 2019, the obvious differences between them were the 9% disparity in CUDA cores and the considerably faster memory on the Ti. The GTX 1660 Super, on the other hand, is less of a gap-bridging GPU and more of an alternative to the 1660 Ti. It has a slightly higher TDP, a slightly higher clock speed, and faster memory. It has the same GPU and CUDA core count as the standard 1660, posting it ever-so-slightly below the 1660 Ti in terms of its raw performance, but it’s a close-run race.

In practice, this results in a graphics card lineup that is oddly stacked. The GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti are clearly defined as top and bottom of this trio of cards, but the GTX 1660 Super is barely weaker than the 1660 Ti. In some testing, we’ve seen it perform as little as 2% worse. That’s a near-insignificant difference and certainly problematic for the Ti, because there’s a near $50 difference between them, which at this price level is dramatic.

It depends on the game, though. At 1080p, especially, the 1660 Super soars ahead on its Ti and normal variants in Resident Evil 2. However, the Ti version trades places with the Super in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and the two are nearly identical in Battlefield V. The only constant between games is the normal GTX 1660. It consistently performs lower than the Super and Ti variants, even if it’s only by a small margin.

The various factory overclocked and cooled versions of each card may even things out on a pricing scale, but the GTX 1660 Super eats into the 1660 Ti’s market considerably, giving it little room to breathe.

Ray tracing, Reshade, NULL

One of the greatest differences between Nvidia’s GTX and its RTX graphics cards is that the latter features RT cores and Tensor cores for ray tracing and deep learning super sampling acceleration. The GTX graphics cards, including the 16-series, can perform ray-tracing calculations, but without high levels of general compute performance (like a 1080 Ti has, for example), it’s largely unplayable. The GTX 1660 Super isn’t any better than GTX 1070 is, which is rather poor.

DLSS (deep learning super sampling) is also off the table with these cards, as they lack the Tensor cores to support it. What they can do, though, is take advantage of other Nvidia driver-level features. All three of the GTX 1660s support Nvidia’s ultra-low-latency (NULL) technology, for faster in-game response during competitive play. They can also enjoy all the post-processing effects introduced with Nvidia’s Reshade support.

Reshade isn’t new — gamers have been enjoying its effects on AMD and Nvidia GPUs for years already, but now it’s officially supported and integrated through Nvidia’s control panel. All three of the 1660s fully support this. But due to the slight performance hit that some processing effects and filters take, the 1660 Ti should be the best equipped to handle it. We doubt the Super will be too far behind, though.

The 1660 and 1660 Ti feel super redundant

Nvidia made an intriguing move with the introduction of the GTX 1660 Super. It’s an excellent card that offers noticeably improved performance over the GTX 1660 at a price that is almost identical for some models and little more than $10 to $20 higher for others. That means we’re almost always going to recommend the Super over the standard 1660. But what about the Ti?

The 1660 Ti is the most capable of the three 1660s, but only by a little. Because its performance is so close, we expect most gamers to be able to eliminate that gap with a little overclocking.

We recommend the Super overall, even if the Ti performs better in certain titles. Unfortunately, it’s hard to recommend any of them right now. All three cards are out of stock basically everywhere, so we recommend keeping an eye out for a 3060 Ti or picking up a 3060 when it launches in late February (though it’s always good to wait for third-party benchmarks).

AMD doesn’t have anything competitive in this price bracket, at least from the current generation. The RX 6800 and 6800 XT are impressive cards, though, so we imagine AMD will release cheaper cards based on the same architecture some time in 2021.

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