NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Turing GPU Rumored With Disabled RT Cores

While NVIDIA's GeForce RTX family of products has garnered the bulk of the attention in the gaming graphics community over the past few months, we have been hearing some rumblings about another incoming family of Turing-based graphics cards. Rumors have been suggesting that NVIDIA is working on a next-generation GeForce GTX family that will slot under the current GeForce RTX family.

The latest report calls out the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, which will allegedly be based on the familiar Turing GPU architecture that underpins the GeForce RTX cards. However, it will have its ray tracing (RT) cores disabled to provide some product differentiation between it and its pricier siblings. 

Although real-time ray tracing is no doubt an impressive graphics enhancement for games that support that support the feature, it is a performance killer. Games like Battlefield V can see upwards of a 40 percent performance hit with DXR enabled on Ultra settings at a resolution of 2560x1440.

For gamers that don't really care about ray tracing at the moment, or are simply waiting for future generations where the performance penalty is lessened, Turing-based GeForce GTX cards might be considered a good stopgap measure. And they would presumably be priced less than their GeForce RTX counterparts.

According to VideoCardz, the rumored GeForce GTX 1660 Ti would have 1536 CUDA cores -- compared to 1280 for the GeForce GTX 1060 and 1920 for the GeForce RTX 2060 -- and would features 6GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit memory bus.

If these specs are accurate, it looks as though NVIDIA would be hindering performance of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti just enough to give the GeForce RTX 2060 an overall edge in performance. Now we just need to how NVIDIA will be pricing these cards and when they'll be available for purchase.