The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Review, Feat. EVGA XC GAMING: Turing Sheds RTX for the Mainstream Market
by Ryan Smith & Nate Oh on February 22, 2019 9:00 AM ESTTotal War: Warhammer II (DX11)
Last in our 2018 game suite is Total War: Warhammer II, built on the same engine of Total War: Warhammer. While there is a more recent Total War title, Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia, that game was built on the 32-bit version of the engine. The first TW: Warhammer was a DX11 game was to some extent developed with DX12 in mind, with preview builds showcasing DX12 performance. In Warhammer II, the matter, however, appears to have been dropped, with DX12 mode still marked as beta, but also featuring performance regression for both vendors.
It's unfortunate because Creative Assembly themselves have acknowledged the CPU-bound nature of their games, and with re-use of game engines as spin-offs, DX12 optimization would have continued to provide benefits, especially if the future of graphics in RTS-type games will lean towards low-level APIs.
There are now three benchmarks with varying graphics and processor loads; we've opted for the Battle benchmark, which appears to be the most graphics-bound.
Rounding out our look at game performance is Total War: Warhammer II.
Here, the GTX 1660 Ti lags behind the RTX 2060 and GTX 1070 FE more than in the other games, offering only somewhere around 80% of the RTX 2060 speed and 90% of the GTX 1070. In turn, it doesn't improve as much upon the GTX 1060 6GB and GTX 960, though practically speaking it has rendered its RX 590 competition as last-generation performance, given that it's neck-and-neck with the GTX 1060 6GB FE.
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wintermute000 - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link
There is no way your 970 runs 1440p maxed in modern AAA games. Unless your definition of maxed includes frames well below 60 and settings well below ultra.I have a 1060 and it needs medium to medium-high to reliably hold 60FPS @ 1440p.
eddman - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link
$280 for ~40% on average better performance and still 6GB of memory? I already have a 6GB 1060. I suppose I have to wait for navi or 30 series before actually upgrading.Fallen Kell - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link
I guess you missed the part where their memory compression technology has increased performance another 20-33% over previous generation 10xx cards, negating the need to higher memory bandwidth and more space within the card. So, 6GB on this card is essentially like 8-9GB on the previous generation. That is what compression can do (as long as you can compress and decompress fast enough, which doesn't seem to be a problem for this hardware).eddman - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link
No, I didn't. Compression is not a replacement for physical memory, no matter what nvidia claims.eddman - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link
I'm not an expert on this topic, but they state compression is used as a mean to improve bandwidth, not memory space consumption.Someone more knowledgeable can clear this up, but to my understanding textures are compressed when moving from vram to gpu, and not when loading from hdd/ssd or system memory into vram.
Ryan Smith - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link
"I'm not an expert on this topic, but they state compression is used as a mean to improve bandwidth, not memory space consumption."You are correct.
atiradeonag - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link
Laughing at those who think they can get a $279 Vega56 right now: where's your card? where's the link?atiradeonag - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link
Posting a random "sale" being instantly OOS is the usual failed stunt that fanboys from a certain faction to argue for the price/perfOxford Guy - Saturday, February 23, 2019 - link
It's also Newegg par for the course.CiccioB - Friday, February 22, 2019 - link
At those all rejoicing that Vega56 is selling for a slice of bread.. that's the end that failing architecture do when they are a generation behind.Yes, nvidia cards are pricey, but that's because AMD solutions can stand up the competition with them even with expensive components like HBM and tons more of W to suck.
So stop laughing about how poor is this new card price/performance ratio, after few weeks it will have the ratio that the market is going to give it. What we have seen so far is that Vega appeal has gone under the ground level, and as for any new nvidia launch AMD can answer only with a price cut, close followed by a rebrand of something that is OCed (and pumped with even more W).
GCN was dead at its launch time. Let's really hope Navi is something new or we will have nvidia monopoly on the market for another 2 year period.