Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti: Performance Analysis

Crysis 3, Far Cry 5, Ghost Recon Wildlands

Guide by Richard Leadbetter Technology Editor, Digital Foundry

Published on 22 Feb 2019

Our battery of tests continues with our old favourite, Crysis 3, backed up with more modern fare in the form of Far Cry 5 and Ghost Recon Wildlands. Our test system remains the same obviously, consisting of a Core i7 8700K running at an all-core turbo speed of 4.7GHz. This is paired with two 8GB sticks of 3400MHz DDR4 supplied by GSkill, with all titles running from solid state storage. To ensure that the power-hungry 8700K doesn't overheat, a Corsair H110i all-in-one liquid cooler is used.

Depending on how you view this page, our performance metrics are presented in one of two ways. If you're reading this on a mobile device, you'll get a table with average frame-rate and lowest one per cent measurements. However, if you're on a desktop or laptop, you get the full-blooded Digital Foundry experience. Play the YouTube videos to see frame-rate and frame-time metrics running in parallel to the video (you can even navigate around the video with the graphs adjusting to match). Beneath that you'll see our barcharts, dynamically generated from the frame-time metrics - mouse over for various stats and press the mouse button to swap over to the more useful percentage differentials.

All performance data is derived from video captures of each graphics card - no internal metrics here, the gold standard in analysis comes from measuring what's actually emerging from the video output of the GPU.

Crysis 3

Our classic Crysis 3 benchmark, hailing from the end of the taxing Welcome to the Jungle Stage is an example of a legacy title that has a profound dislike of modern GPU architectures. GTX 1070 bests the newcomer by around seven to nine per cent, depending on the resolution you choose. Crysis 3 isn't keen on Vega or Turing, but the more expensive Vega 56 still manages a convincing win here, while the game also hands in one of the lowest boosts over GTX 1060 seen in our tests, though we are still in 28 to 31 per cent territory.

Crysis 3: Very High, SMAA T2X

Far Cry 5

The Dunia Engine evolves once more for the latest numbered series entry in the Far Cry saga. The new GTX 1660 Ti is effectively on level terms with the GTX 1070, though stutter can creep in occasionally to bring those lowest one per cent and five per cent scores down up against Pascal - something you'll see on the RTX 2060 too. The comparisons with Vega 56 are generally impressive too, while we're looking at a 31 to 34 per cent improvement over GTX 1060, depending on resolution.

Far Cry 5: Ultra, TAA

Ghost Recon Wildlands

Business as usual for the GTX 1660 Ti, with performance at 1080p and 1440p just a touch higher than GTX 1070 - albeit with some issues in the lowest one per cent scores. The new card gets pretty close to Vega 56 at 1080p, though the AMD hardware pulls ahead at 1440p. Once again, we're looking at a 31 to 33 per cent performance boost over the old GTX 1060.