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

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 is high-end desktop graphics card based on the Ampere generation. It uses the big GA102 chip and offers 10,496 shaders and 24 GB GDDR6X graphics memory. Compared to the slower RTX 3080, the 3090 offers 10 - 20% higher gaming performance, but only above 4k. Still it has not enough power for 8k gaming at maximum detail settings. The RTX3090 is rated at 350 Watt but the power efficiency is still quite good.

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).