Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti models with 3GB on the way

[HEXUS]

A number of Asus SKUs with 3GB have appeared in official EEC trade documents.

Read more.

[cptwhite_uk]

3Gb was questionable 2 years ago, now it's a real issue. No one should be buying cards with less than 4Gb vRAM.

[PC-LAD]

3Gb was questionable 2 years ago, now it's a real issue. No one should be buying cards with less than 4Gb VRAM.

I will disagree, for those of us who play competitively. Textures are not that big of a deal, yea games can look nice but in action, it can be hard to notice unless you are lowering resolutions. I play overwatch at medium 1080p on a 660ti and get 120fps (shocking I know). But that consumes no more than 1.5gb of vram. I could go 1440p high no problem on my 970 and I have no doubt that the 1160ti will provide an adiquite experiance if it is for the masses of esports gamers and those who want to play at 1080p high.

[Usernamist]

How can they keep getting away with this? "4K" cards with 8GB (or 11GB if you have more money than sense)and "mid range" cards with UP TO 6GB?? Like, the whole reason we need AMD to compete in the GPU space is to shame nvidia into not ripping us off. It's not working.

[cheesemp]

3Gb was questionable 2 years ago, now it's a real issue. No one should be buying cards with less than 4Gb VRAM.

I will disagree, for those of us who play competitively. Textures are not that big of a deal, yea games can look nice but in action, it can be hard to notice unless you are lowering resolutions. I play overwatch at medium 1080p on a 660ti and get 120fps (shocking I know). But that consumes no more than 1.5gb of vram. I could go 1440p high no problem on my 970 and I have no doubt that the 1160ti will provide an adiquite experiance if it is for the masses of esports gamers and those who want to play at 1080p high.

But this isn't a low end card its a mid range card that will just be ham strung by lack of RAM. Might as well buy a second hand 970 or new 1050 and save a bucket of cash as there is only so fast you can go at 1080. Do you really need 500+ fps?

[Usernamist]

Modern games can already eat up to 8GB at 1080p. Nvidia has officially lost the plot

[Ozaron]

How can they keep getting away with this? "4K" cards with 8GB (or 11GB if you have more money than sense)and "mid range" cards with UP TO 6GB?? Like, the whole reason we need AMD to compete in the GPU space is to shame nvidia into not ripping us off. It's not working.

Yet strangely, with AMD competing with cards which *do* have the VRAM capacity you think is required, they're losing and performing worse, and these strange 3GB XX60s persist. It's almost like it doesn't matter as much as people think it does...

[eHM]

This naming scheme is just everywhere....

1160 sure... 1160Ti, why.... 3Gb, in 2019? Double why....

Nope 1660Ti 3Gb what a creation......

[Usernamist]

Yet strangely, with AMD competing with cards which *do* have the VRAM capacity you think is required, they're losing and performing worse, and these strange 3GB XX60s persist. It's almost like it doesn't matter as much as people think it does...

See:

Modern games can already eat up to 8GB at 1080p. Nvidia has officially lost the plot

That just goes to show you that there's literally no reason for nvidia to RAM-starve their cards. If AMD can sell you a card with enough VRAM for modern games, you bet your ass Nvidia can. They just choose not to because they can force you to upgrade sooner. You've completely missed the point I was making, try again.

[Corky34]

Modern games can already eat up to 8GB at 1080p. Nvidia has officially lost the plot

What a game requests is different than what it needs, the only thing not having sufficient VRAM will do is effect performance as stuff will have to be fetched from system memory, SSD, or HDD. I'm guessing Nvidia have run the numbers and decided that at this price point and the sort of system this will be going into that fetching data from other places isn't something that will either happen very often or doesn't have a massive performance penalty associated with it.

When i had a Voodoo 2 with 8MB and played Quake in 800x600 the HDD light would be almost constantly on, i guess it effected performance but all i cared about was getting 100+ FPS.

[cptwhite_uk]

It's the 1% lows that suffer due to the lack of vRAM, introdcing microstuttering and pop-in of game assets. Sure, for a budget GPU for light gaming, in the sub £120 bracket, 3Gb might be justifyable. It's not for mid-range cards that are going to cost £230ish.

[Usernamist]

What a game requests is different than what it needs, the only thing not having sufficient VRAM will do is effect performance as stuff will have to be fetched from system memory, SSD, or HDD. I'm guessing Nvidia have run the numbers and decided that at this price point and the sort of system this will be going into that fetching data from other places isn't something that will either happen very often or doesn't have a massive performance penalty associated with it.

When i had a Voodoo 2 with 8MB and played Quake in 800x600 the HDD light would be almost constantly on, i guess it effected performance but all i cared about was getting 100+ FPS.

Well, yeah. Exactly that. Performance is the main metric you measure a GPU's value with. Did you know that GDDR5(X) is a lot faster than system memory/storage? Running out of Vram causes stutters and a generally unfavourable gaming experience. This card will likely be capable at running most games at 1080p or 1440p with maxed out graphics settings, but because of the stingy vram limit, we'll have to disable shaders and lower texture quality just so it doesn't stutter all the time. Disappointing.

[afiretruck]

What a game requests is different than what it needs, the only thing not having sufficient VRAM will do is effect performance as stuff will have to be fetched from system memory, SSD, or HDD.

Not necessarily. AMD's High Bandwidth Cache Controller model works like this (if it's actually enabled now?), but I've seen Deus Ex: Mankind Divided running on a GTX 970 and a GTX 1060 crash and burn when you set it to 4k with high resolution textures. So I don't think Nvidia has this behaviour built into the driver. (That was the case a few months ago, not sure if they've changed it.).

Now a decent game engine should be able to do this, no problem, but a lot won't or just can't because of how the game itself works.

[Ozaron]

Here is the point where you're wrong.

That just goes to show you that there's literally no reason for nvidia to RAM-starve their cards.

Of course you're right that NVidia can add more VRAM. Yes, it is kinda stingy to deliberately not do that. But...

What a game requests is different than what it needs... ..I'm guessing Nvidia have run the numbers and decided that at this price point

As it has always been, maximum details in the biggest triple A games require you to spend more money on your GPU. The difference is that before what a game requested was more brute force, whereas now it seems to be moving towards greater VRAM capacity to perform post effects calculations and hold all those gigantic 4k textures, for example. Corky is exactly right - if you don't pay for the VRAM to have those things, you can still play your games just fine at your expected resolutions and require only a fraction of the VRAM capacity, probably with fairly reasonable detail levels, but without the fancy extras which allow you to say you've got the game "at max detail".

Well, yeah. Exactly that. Performance is the main metric you measure a GPU's value with. Did you know that GDDR5(X) is a lot faster than system memory/storage? Running out of Vram causes stutters and a generally unfavourable gaming experience. This card will likely be capable at running most games at 1080p or 1440p with maxed out graphics settings, but because of the stingy vram limit, we'll have to disable shaders and lower texture quality just so it doesn't stutter all the time. Disappointing.

As should be expected from a card which will not be priced in the "this can run 1440p max details everywhere" bracket. That's the point. RTX 2060 already does that; this GPU is supposed to have fewer shaders and less features. RTX 2060 seems to get by just fine on 6GB, and 1660Ti will be a downgrade, so for 1080p tier gaming you might as well drop to 3GB and lose some post processing for the price.

If NVidia gave cards like these more VRAM, you'd just be paying more for very little. AMD's already providing the right VRAM capacity because their sheer gaming grunt is apparently lacking and they don't need to further hamstring themselves, if anything they give more VRAM than they need (RX 570 8GB?) to reduce the performance and mindshare gap.

[Usernamist]

As should be expected from a card which will not be priced in the "this can run 1440p max details everywhere" bracket. That's the point. RTX 2060 already does that; this GPU is supposed to have fewer shaders and less features. RTX 2060 seems to get by just fine on 6GB, and 1660Ti will be a downgrade, so for 1080p tier gaming you might as well drop to 3GB and lose some post processing for the price.

If NVidia gave cards like these more VRAM, you'd just be paying more for very little. AMD's already providing the right VRAM capacity because their sheer gaming grunt is apparently lacking and they don't need to further hamstring themselves, if anything they give more VRAM than they need (RX 570 8GB?) to reduce the performance and mindshare gap.

The 2060 only has 6GB lmao, that's barely enough for 1080p gaming. It should be expected that a card is matched with the amount of VRAM that it can utilize, not artificially handicapped to sell more units in the long-run. If they wanted to sell a card aimed at playing 1080p games in 2019, they should -wait for it- price and spec it accordingly. $350 for the RTX series 1080p card is straight-up predatory.

Lets assume they don't increase the price for the 60 series again and sell at about $200 (wishful thinking, but possible). That's Fortnight at ultra settings for the price of a base console. Wait no, now that I see it written down it makes a lot more sense. The poor saps who buy it deserve it.

Edit: You're also conveniently forgetting that you could get a good 1080p gaming card for $200 three years ago. For this new card to have a reason to exist, it has to perform better, not equally.

[darcotech]

Why they need 3Gb ?! "640Kb is all you ever going to need", right?