AMD Radeon 680M vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti (Desktop)

AMD Radeon 680M

The AMD Radeon 680M is an integrated GPU in the Ryzen 6000 series for laptops (Rembrandt, e.g. Ryzen 9 6980HX). The iGPU is based on the RDNA2 architecture and has 12 CUs (= 768 shaders) clocked at up to 2,400 MHz (depending on the CPU model). The 680M and 660M iGPUs are the first integrated graphics card with hardware raytracing support, although the performance is too slow to use it in current games.

Thanks to the new architecture, high core count and the increased maximum core clock, the Radeon 680M should be clearly faster then the old Radeon Vega 8 iGPUs. Therefore, the 680M should be the fastest integrated graphics card in early 2022. Compared to the dedicated Radeon 5300M (also RDNA), the 680M should still be significantly slower. According to AMD, the Radeon 680M (in the 6800U) is faster than a dedicated Nvidia GeForce MX450 and best suited for 1080p gaming and low details (for AAA games).

Thanks to the modern 6nm process and clever power-saving features, the power consumption is comparatively low (according to AMD), so the graphics card can also be used for slim and light notebooks (depending on the CPU model). The whole Ryzen 6000 chip can be configured down to 15W.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is a powerful, mid-tier, Turing-based, desktop GPU. The GTX 1660 Ti relies on the TU116 chip with 1536 shader units, 48 ROPs, 96 TMUs and a 192-bit-wide memory bus (clocked at 6 GHz, effectively 12 GHz, bandwidth: up to 288 GB/s). The notebook version of the GTX 1660 Ti  is 10 to 20 % slower due to a lower TDP.

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 Ti performs somewhat worse than the GeForce GTX 1070, but significantly better than the GeForce GTX 1060. Therefore, it is best-suited for Full HD gaming. However, it can run less demanding titles in 1440p.

The energy consumption of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti amounts to 120 watts. The older GeForce GTX 1060 also has a TDP of 120 watts.