AMD Radeon RX 540 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Max-Q

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.