Nvidia may be working on a GTX branded Turing card after all. The latest rumors point to a card called the 1660 Ti which would be a little slower than an RTX 2060, lack the Tensor and RT Cores which make deep learning super sampling (DLSS) and ray tracing possible, and ultimately sell at a lower price.
Nvidia's RTX generation of graphics cards are powerful and capable, with some intriguing features which have us wondering about what the future of graphics may be — is ray tracing a feature that's here to stay in all games, or just something like Nvidia's Hairworks? We'll have to wait and see but for those wanting a mid-range upgrade solution, there isn't much on offer. Even the RTX 2060 with its 1070 Ti-like performance is a little on the expensive side at $350. The 1660 Ti could change that.
Three separate sources have confirmed to Videocardz that this is something Nvidia is actively producing and though there is no hard release date for it yet, we're told that it will replace the 1060 entirely, leading to its removal from the market. With that in mind, we wouldn't expect this card to launch for a good few months, as Nvidia still has a lot of GTX 1060 stock left over from its overproduction during the GPU mining days.
When this card does launch, though, it could be surprisingly capable. Rumored specifications suggest it will have the same 6GB of GDDR6 as the RTX 2060, and the same 192-bit memory bus. However, it will have a reduced number of CUDA cores, at 1,526, as opposed to the RTX 2060's 1,920.
That will make it a weaker card, perhaps somewhat more equivalent to a GTX 1070. Considering those cards are still upwards of $350, if Nvidia can price this around the $280 mark, it could be on to a real winner. It would certainly blow AMD's RX 590 out of the water.