NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 (Desktop) vs NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 Ti is a high-end desktop graphics card based on the Ampere generation. It was announced early 2022 the fastest desktop gaming graphics card.

It uses the big GA102 chip and offers 10,752 shaders and 24 GB GDDR6X graphics memory. The RTX3090ti is rated at 450 Watt.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 is a mid-tier, Turing-based, desktop GPU. The GTX 1660 relies on the TU116 chip with 1,408 shader units, 48 ROPs, 88 TMUs and a 192-bit-wide memory bus (clocked at 2 GHz = 8 GHz effectively 12 GHz, bandwidth: up to 192.1 GB/s).

The TU116 chip and other Turing-based GPUs are produced using the 12-nm manufacturing process. However, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti does not offer the latest features such as DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and Real Time Ray Tracing. Nevertheless, there are some architectural improvements when it comes to floating point and integer performance. These operations can now be carried out simultaneously. Other notable features include Adaptive Shading, unified cache, DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) as well as H.265 encoding and decoding (PlayReady 3.0).

At Full HD resolution, the GeForce GTX 1660 is slightly faster than the old GeForce GTX 1060, but clearly slower than the old GeForce GTX 1070 (and GTX 1660 Ti). Therefore, the GTX1660 is well suited for demanding games of 2019 in 1080p and high - max details (see gaming benchmarks below).

The energy consumption of the GeForce GTX 1660 amounts to 120 watts (like the 1660 Ti or GTX 1060).

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 is a fast desktop graphics card. It is based on the GA106 Ampere chip and offers 12 GB GDDR6 graphics memory with a 192 Bit memory bus. It offers 3,584 cores and supports PCIe 4.0.

The performance is similar to the older GeForce RTX 2070 and therefore best suited for 1080p gaming of modern and demanding games in high settings.

The GA106 chip offers 3,840 FP32 ALUs of which half can also execute INT32 instructions (i.e. 1,920 INT32 ALUs). With Turing all shaders could still execute FP32 or INT32 instructions. The raytracing and tensor cores on the chip were also improved according to Nvidia. The Ampere chips also include an improved 5th generation video encoder (NVENC for H.264 and H.265) and a 7th generation decoder (for various formats now including AV1).

The GA106 chip is manufactured by Samsung in 8nm (8N), which is not quite able to keep up with the 7nm node at TSMC (e.g. used by AMD and also for the professional GA100 Ampere chip). The TDP of the RTX 3060 is specified at 170 Watt and therefore slightly higher than the previous RTX 2060 (160 Watt).