The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Review, Feat. EVGA XC GAMING: Turing Stakes Its Claim at $219
by Ryan Smith & Nate Oh on March 14, 2019 9:01 AM ESTWolfenstein II: The New Colossus (Vulkan)
id Software is popularly known for a few games involving shooting stuff until it dies, just with different 'stuff' for each one: Nazis, demons, or other players while scorning the laws of physics. Wolfenstein II is the latest of the first, the sequel of a modern reboot series developed by MachineGames and built on id Tech 6. While the tone is significantly less pulpy nowadays, the game is still a frenetic FPS at heart, succeeding DOOM as a modern Vulkan flagship title and arriving as a pure Vullkan implementation rather than the originally OpenGL DOOM.
Featuring a Nazi-occupied America of 1961, Wolfenstein II is lushly designed yet not oppressively intensive on the hardware, something that goes well with its pace of action that emerge suddenly from a level design flush with alternate historical details.
The highest quality preset, "Mein leben!", was used. Wolfenstein II also features Vega-centric GPU Culling and Rapid Packed Math, as well as Radeon-centric Deferred Rendering; in accordance with the preset, neither GPU Culling nor Deferred Rendering was enabled.
As we've seen before, Turing and Vega tend to run well on Wolfenstein II. For our games, these results are the only other title where the RX 590 is at least even with the GTX 1660. Meanwhile, the GTX 1060 3GB stumbles for want of VRAM, especially in the 99th percentiles. To that end, the GTX 1660 is more than 3X the performance of the GTX 1060 3GB, but also well ahead of the GTX 1060 6GB by 35% or more.
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Qasar - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
it also depends on if the consoles even have any games some one would want to play... for me.. those games are not on consoles.. they are on a comp... not worth it for me to by a console as it would just sit under my tv unused..D. Lister - Saturday, March 16, 2019 - link
@eva02langley: "...console hardware is more efficient since it is dedicated for gaming only."smh... console hardware used to be more efficient for gaming when console hardware was composed of custom parts. Now, consoles use essentially the same parts as PCs, so that argument doesn't work anymore.
Fact of the matter is, consoles remain competitive in framerate by either cutting down on internal resolution, or graphic quality features, like AA, AF, AO, or in many cases, both res and features. Take a look at the face-offs conducted by the Digital Foundry over at Eurogamers.net.
D. Lister - Saturday, March 16, 2019 - link
@eva02langley: I also find it rather ironic that you, who has often criticized NVidia for not being open-sourced enough with their technologies, are making a case here for consoles that are completely proprietary and closed-off systems.maroon1 - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
Faster, consume much less power, smaller and produce less noise than RX590 which cost sameEven if you ignore the performance advantage, the GTX 1660 is still better out of the two. No reason to buy big power hungry GPU when it has no performance advantage
0ldman79 - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
What is it with Wolfenstein that kills the 900 series?I mean they're still competitive in almost everything else, but Wolfenstein just buries the 900 series horribly. If it's that bad I'm glad I'm not addicted to that series. I had thought about picking up a copy, but damn...
Opencg - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
they may be using some async techniques. the famous example is doom where many 900 series saw worse performance on vulkan due to async being a cpu based driver side implementation.Dribble - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
I think it's because it has FP16 code in the shaders - which Turing and newer AMD have hardware support for, but Pascal doesn't. It was AMD's trump card until Turing so you'll find a few AMD sponsored games use FP16.Ryan Smith - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
"What is it with Wolfenstein that kills the 900 series?"Memory capacity. It really wants more than 4GB when all of its IQ settings are cranked up, which leaves everything below the GTX 980 Ti a bit short on space.
AustinPowersISU - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
Used GTX 1070 still makes the most sense. You can easily get one for less than this card and have much better performance.Nvidia needs to do better.
eva02langley - Thursday, March 14, 2019 - link
It is still their best offering in term of price/performance from Turing. However, yeah, that should have been done way before.