1660 Ti vs 1080 Ti

Have you ever wondered how the best of the GTX 10-Series would stack up against the very best the GTX 16-Series had to offer? Us too! That’s why we’re pitting the GTX 1080 Ti against the 1660 Ti in a no-holds-barred ‘vs’ match. It’s going to be bloody, it’s going to be brutal, but most of all, it’s going to be illuminating.

Architecture

Despite that famous GTX family name, in terms of architecture, the 10 and 16-Series are fundamentally different beasts. They’re not so much both categorized as GTX cards because of something they share, rather something they both lack, namely RT or Tensor cores.

The 1660 Ti is a product of the TU116-400-A1 variant of Turing microarchitecture. Although there are no Turing-based buzzwords to speak of in the 1660 Ti such as ray tracing or DLSS, it has been imbued with many other improvements. The 1660 Ti offers a whole new shading type known as mesh shading, as well as variable-rate shading that focuses detail in vital areas of the display. What’s more, by utilizing concurrent data path execution, Turing CUDA cores offer 50% higher performance

The 1080 Ti is built using the GP102-350-K1-A1 variant of Turing’s predecessor, Pascal microarchitecture, and in terms of sheer hardware bulk, the 1080 Ti far outweighs its 16-Series cousin. Featuring 3584 cores spread across 28 SMs compared to the 16’s 1536 across 24 SMs, 224 texture units to the 16’s 96, almost twice the amount of render units, and a massive 2.75MB L2 cache, the 1660 Ti’s spare Turing architecture is going to have to work pretty hard to keep up. With faster overall clock speeds and larger L1 caches, perhaps it can.

Cooling

Whether or not the 1660 Ti has the goods to take on the 1080 Ti in the gaming arena, it certainly has the best thermal performance. Not only does it have a 4°C higher thermal capacity than the 1080 Ti, it rarely exceeds temperatures of 60°C, giving it massive 34°C headroom for overclocking should the feeling take you. With a comparably small amount of components and a super energy efficient 120-watt pull, it’s no surprise it’s such a cool card, and with max fan volumes reaching just over 45dBA, it’s incredibly quiet too.

The 1080 Ti is a monster of a card, and as such, practically breathes fire! With a 252-watt pull and all that hardware churning out frames, it can reach highs of 84°C which is a little worrying considering its thermal capacity maxes out at 91°C. If you’re going to push this card to its limits with some overclocking, we’d highly recommend a custom loop, and it might even be worth looking into an axial (open-air) edition card.

Dimensions

Form factor is another massive feather in the 1660 Ti’s cap. In fact, the whole 16-Series is a very diminutive family of GPUs indeed, each measuring roughly half the length of neighboring GPU families. This is largely due to the 12-nm process size as opposed to 10-Series’ 16-nm process size. At 284mm2, the 1660 Ti also has a significantly smaller die size.

Measuring only 4.37” (H) x 5.7” (L) x 2-slot (W), the 1660 Ti will fit into almost any case type, micro towers included. The 1080 Ti, on the other hand, measuring 4.376” (H) x 10.5” (L) x 2-slot (W), is a much beefier card, and may even need some sort of support if your case brackets aren’t big or strong enough to prevent sagging.

Resolutions and Frames Per Second

Right then. Let’s see what that Turing architecture is capable of.

1080p

We have to say that we’re pleasantly surprised by the 1660 Ti’s performance in 1080p on ultra settings. It averages over 100fps for most titles, only falling into the 80fps zone when challenged by graphically demanding games.

The 1080 Ti bursts out into the 1080p arena like a wild animal, slinging averages way over 200fps for certain titles. Averages drop to between 107-115fps for GPU-heavy games such as GTA V and The Witcher 3, but it’s newer games that really hit the 1080 Ti. Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla drags its average down to 58fps

1440p

Both cards do great in 1440p on ultra settings. As you’d expect, across a number of titles, the 1080 Ti hangs in really close to a 100fps average, performing particularly well during Death Stranding (highs of 90.3fps) and Apex Legends (highs of 100.5fps). Newer, GPU-demanding games still pose a challenge, bringing fps averages down into the low 40s and high 30s.

The 1660 Ti keeps its head above water with a 71.1fps 1440p average overall, which is an excellent performance capable of providing a lag-free, immersive, and enjoyable gaming experience.

4K

It’s a bit of a bumpy ride even for the 1080 Ti in 4K, achieving averages just short of the desired 60fps. The 1660 Ti does give it a hell of a go, finishing with a very respectable 42.5fps average. While neither card is particularly suited to running demanding games in 4K, you can give the slower, less graphically dense titles a try to some success.

Ray Tracing

The absence of hardware ray tracing leaves the 16-Series in a decidedly othered position in the grand scheme of Nvidia GPUs. They share the RTX’s Turing DNA, but don’t have their light-harnessing RT cores. They share the 10-Series GTX moniker, but not their Pascalian architecture.

That said, this is a pretty high-powered pair of graphics cards, so they’ll be able to run software ray tracing really well. The 1660 Ti will take to it easier thanks to those Turing bones, but the 1080 Ti, being the beast it is, should also be able to handle the RT workload without hemorrhaging too many frames. Software ray tracing isn’t quite as life-changing as hardware ray tracing, but it’s good to know you can give it a go and experience at least a fraction of its illuminative spectacle.

VRAM

In terms of capacity, the 1080 Ti takes the VRAM crown. It features a massive 11GB of GDDR5X memory. It has a faster 352-bit bus memory interface and 448.4GBps bandwidth too. The 1660 Ti only features a 192-bit bus memory interface and 288GBps bandwidth, but here’s the thing…the 1660 Ti technically has the more efficient memory configuration.

With 6GB of GDDR6 memory, the 1660 Ti is far more energy-efficient, and while 5X was given a lot of what makes GDDR6 faster, it wasn’t given it all, perfectly illustrated by the fact the 1660 Ti has a 1500MHz frequency and 12GBps effective speed compared to the 1080 Ti’s 1376MHz frequency and 11GBps effective speed.

Verdict

It’s clear that the 1080 Ti is the best card for gaming by virtue of its rare hardware muscle, but whether it’s right for you is another question entirely. This is an expensive card, so you want to ensure you have the means to get the most out of it, and to do that, you’ll need a powerful CPU that won’t bottleneck frame rates and a high-resolution monitor.

For gaming in 1080p, the 1080 Ti is overkill. You simply won’t need that much power. The 1660 Ti, on the other hand, hits the sweet spot for gaming in this resolution and can even handle certain games in 1440p, not to mention the fact it’s way cheaper, smaller, more energy-efficient, and runs way cooler than the 1080 Ti.

So, if for some reason you need loads of GPU power, say, for high res or VR gaming, the 1080 Ti becomes a realistic option, but for any other applications, the 1660 Ti will do just fine.