The hardware paparazzi have managed to catch a glimpse of Nvidia's 1660 Ti Turing GPU without any clothes on whatsoever. The scandal! The nude chip confirms earlier rumors of a different GPU at the heart of Nvidia's non-RTX graphics cards. This one is the TU116-400 which while built on the same size package, appears to be less than half the size of the larger TU106-400 found in the RTX 2060 and 2070.
The reason that the 1660 Ti is more compact is due to its lessened CUDA core count as well as its lack of Turing RT cores. It's not clear yet whether this chip will also lack the Tensor cores which makes Nvidia's cards capable of DLSS and more AI-focused compute tasks, but there's no denying that this is a much smaller and more restrictive GPU compared to its larger RTX cousins.
These nude board snaps come from Videocardz, which managed to get hold of an MSI GTX 1660 Ti dual-fan card. It shows a simple and traditional layout for the 1660 Ti PCB, with memory chips located around the GPU die, not on it as with AMD's HBM solutions. There also appear to be space for a couple of extra chips if required, so perhaps we'll see an 8GB version of the 1660 Ti in the future.
The rumored specifications for this mid-range Nvidia graphics card suggest it will have around 1,500 CUDA cores, 20 percent less than the RTX 2060 and 20 percent more than the GTX 1060. It will come in both 3GB and 6GB guises, both using GDDR6 for high bandwidth — although the 3GB solution could be on the limiting side for high-resolution textures and anything above 1080P resolution.
Both are expected to debut on February 22 with the 6GB 1660 Ti costing around $280..