Following hints of a new mid-range of Turing-powered graphics cards, Nvidia has now made it official with the announcement of the 1660 Ti and 1660. It's not an announcement that was meant to go public just yet, as the talk where the cards were revealed was one limited to add-in board partners — somebody is going to be in trouble if it's discovered who leaked the news — but we now know what's going on all the same, thanks to Videocardz.
The new cards are said to be part of the "Turing family" and will use modified Turing graphics cores, but won't offer ray tracing support with Nvidia's RT cores. The 1660 Ti and 1660 are expected to be slightly weaker in performance than the RTX 2060 (which has itself around GTX 1070 Ti-like power) and will have reduced price tags to match. We would expect to see GTX 1070 and GTX 1060+-like performance from the two cards, with $300 and $250 price tags to match.
The 1660 Ti will come with 6GB of GDDR6 memory, while the GTX 1660 will have two options: 6GB and 3GB, with prices reflecting those options.
It's not known yet whether these cards will support Nvidia's DLSS feature for enhanced anti-aliasing-like features, but if they do, that could make these cards far more capable than the direct-competition: AMD's RX 580 and 590 GPUs.
We don't have any release date news for these cards just yet, but if AIBs are only just learning about them we wouldn't expect them to show up at retail for a good few months yet. Perhaps they'll debut this Summer to coincide with the expected announcement of AMD's Navi graphics cards.