The RT and Tensor Cores apparently require a certain level of traditional GPU horsepower to be effective in games. GTX 1660 Ti is also a clear admission that the full Turing architecture seen thus far doesn’t scale downwards as far as Nvidia might like, and just as clear a confirmation that Hybrid Rendering isn’t ready for mass adoption. Without these cores, then, we’re back to familiar GTX territory (and TFLOPs – remember those?!), though as to where the ‘16’ came from, your guess is as good as ours – answers on a postcard in the comments, please. Both of the latter are necessary for Nvidia’s ‘Hybrid Rendering’ technique (measured by the made up “RTX-OPS” unit) that games like Battlefield V and Metro Exodus are just now starting to realise, and they are also responsible for the RTX naming. To be clear, then, GTX 1660 Ti uses a brand new GPU built using Turing CUDA cores but without any RT Cores (used for ray tracing) or Tensor Cores (used for AI processing and DLSS). It’s been a thoroughly unexciting time, hasn’t it? AMD, meanwhile, has struggled to capitalise on this absence of green, content instead with simply hitting F5, and has only released refreshed Polaris ( RX 580/ RX 570) and, well, re-refreshed Polaris cards with RX 590. The GTX 1660 Ti is the start of Nvidia’s answer to the cries of crestfallen PC gamers that aren’t interested in paying for hardware that can only be fully leveraged in a handful of titles, and would instead prefer a GPU that is faster all-round and has more usable features as well as a more realistic price tag – you know, the way upgrades used to work.Īstonishingly, this is Nvidia’s first new GPU launch for the sub-£300 market in over two and a half years (excluding GT parts and refreshes), with the original GTX 1060 6GB having launched in July 2016. Even for those lucky enough to be able to afford the buy-in, much of the cost of entry has undoubtedly been funding specialised cores inherited from the workstation space and dedicated to advanced rendering techniques (real-time ray tracing and DLSS) that few games have managed to utilise, even now. With costs of equivalent-tier parts rising yet again this generation – to the point where the flagship GeForce part, the RTX 2080 Ti, came in at £1,100 – the masses have by and large been left out. For PC gamers dismayed at the seemingly ever increasing cost of their hobby, Nvidia’s RTX family of graphics cards has been a huge disappointment.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |