NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (Desktop) vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is the fastest consumer desktop graphics card in 2018 and the fastest Turing RTX card at launch. It offers 4,352 shaders, 11 GB GDDR6 with a 352 bit interface (14 GHz, 616 GB/s for the Founders Edition). Furthermore, the 2080Ti includes 544 Tensor cores and 68 raytracing cores.

Features

NVIDIA manufacturers the TU102 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 Ti 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 gaming performance of the 2080 Ti is around 27% faster than a RTX 2080 in 4K and around 35% faster than a GTX 1080 Ti. Therefore, the 2080 Ti is capable of max settings in 4K for all current AAA games. Adding raytracing may however reduce the performance below 60 fps.

Power Requirements

NVIDIA estimates that the RTX 2080 Ti should consume a maximum of 250 W or 260 W for the Founders Edition, which is  on a level with the GTX 1080 Ti (250 Watt).

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti with Max-Q Design is a mobile graphics card for laptops that is based on the Turing architecture (TU116 chip). It is designed for thin and light laptops and about 10-15% slower than a regular GTX 1660 Ti for laptops (depending on the cooling capabilities). According to the specifications, the Max-Q variant clocks 22% slower for the base speed and 16% for the boost speed.

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 (Max-Q) but at a reduced TGP of 60 Watt (versus 80 of the laptop version 115 Watt of the desktop version). 

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 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal.

Nvidia specifies a power consumption of 60 Watt TGP (Total Graphics Power) and therefore 20 Watts lower than a normal (Max-P) 1660Ti for laptops. Therefore, the Max-Q variant is well suited for thin and light gaming laptops. The TU116 chip is manufactured in 12nm FFN at TSMC.