NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 (Desktop) vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Mobile vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2050 Mobile

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 sits behind the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti as the second fastest desktop GPU in NVIDIA's current Turing line-up. The RTX 2080 has 2,944 shader units, 8 GB GDDR6 VRAM and a 256-bit interface that runs at 14 GHz and delivers up to 448 GB/s.

Features

NVIDIA manufacturers the TU104 chip on a 12 nm FinFET process and includes features like Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and Real-Time Ray Tracing (RTRT), which should combine to create more realistic lighting effects than older GPUs based on the company's Pascal architecture (if the games supports it). The RTX 2080 is also DisplayPort 1.4 ready, while there is also support for HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) and H.265 video en/decoding (PlayReady 3.0).

Performance

The RTX 2080 should perform on par with a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, but it will outclass the latter in games that support DLSS and RTRT. The RTX 2080 is at the pinnacle of consumer desktop GPUs and can play most triple-A games released in 2018 at high graphics in 4K.

Power Requirements

NVIDIA estimates that the RTX 2080 should consume a maximum of 215 W, which is 35 W higher than the company rates its GeForce GTX 1080.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti for laptops is a mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU116 chip). Compared to the faster RTX 2000 GPUs (e.g. RTX 2060), the 1660Ti integrates no Raytracing or Tensor cores. The performance is similar to the old GTX 1070 (laptop) but at a reduced TGP of 80 Watt (versus 115 Watt). Compared to the desktop GTX 1660 Ti, the clock speeds are reduced (3% lower base, 10% lower boost).

In April 2020 Nvidia refreshed the GTX 1660 Ti with the new codename N18E-G0-A1 with similar specs and pin compatible to the refreshed RTX chips (e.g., RTX 2070 Super Mobile).

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games. Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to up to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal.

The power consumption of the 1660Ti for latops is specified at 80 Watt TGP (Total Graphics Power) by Nvidia and therefore 20 Watt higher than the efficient (and slower) Max-Q variant of the 1660 Ti. The TU116 chip is manufactured in 12nm FFN at TSMC.