RTX 2060 vs GTX 1660 Ti
The complete head-to-head: full specs, real per-game FPS with 1% lows, ray tracing, a live CPU-bottleneck check, thermals, power and value, with a straight verdict.
GeForce RTX 2060
GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
avg, 1080p
The short answer
The RTX 2060 is the faster, more capable card, about 24% ahead on average and the only one of the two with RT cores and Tensor cores. That matters because the GTX 1660 Ti is a stripped-down Turing chip, same 12nm process and same 6 GB GDDR6 memory setup, but with the ray tracing and DLSS hardware cut out entirely. If you want any path to ray tracing or DLSS, that decides it. If you just want cheap 1080p frames and don't care about either feature, the 1660 Ti gets you most of the speed for less money and less heat.
These two launched months apart in 2019 and share the same 12nm Turing die family, but they are built for different jobs. The RTX 2060 is the full TU106 chip with RT cores and Tensor cores intact. The GTX 1660 Ti uses the cut-down TU116 die, which drops both, so it is a pure rasterizer with no ray tracing and no DLSS at any price.
This page breaks down that Turing sibling rivalry with 1% lows across ten current games, exactly what the RTX 2060's RT and Tensor cores buy you over the 1660 Ti's plain rasterizing, a bottleneck check against your own CPU, and where street prices for each card sit heading into late 2026.
At a glance
Seven dimensions, two cards. Bigger area is not automatically better, each card owns different corners.
Strengths radar
Each axis scored 0-100 relative to the pair
Performance vs price
Up and to the left is better value
Grey dots are neighbouring cards for context.
Which should you buy?
Pick your use case, the winner changes with what you actually do.
24% more headroom and RT/DLSS support give the 2060 more room to grow into future titles.
If ray tracing and DLSS don't matter to you, the 1660 Ti gets close to the same frame rate for noticeably less.
Tensor cores make a real difference for AI workloads even at the same 6 GB, the 1660 Ti has none.
Same NVENC generation on both, so the 2060's extra raw power helps most when encoding and gaming at once.
120 W and a single 8-pin connector make the 1660 Ti the easier fit for compact cases and modest PSUs.
336 GB/s of bandwidth against 288 GB/s helps the 2060 hold up better at higher internal resolutions.
Already own a GTX 1660 Ti? Only upgrade if you want ray tracing.
Short answer: probably not
A 24% gain is decent but not transformative, and if you never touch ray tracing or DLSS, you will feel it mostly as slightly higher frame rates for slightly more heat and noise. The 1660 Ti at 1080p is still a competent card in 2026 for anything that isn't visually demanding.
If you do want RT and DLSS and are set on Turing pricing, the RTX 2060 is the cheapest legitimate way in. For a bigger jump, look at a used RTX 3060, which adds real DLSS 2 performance and doubles the VRAM to 12 GB for not much more money on the used market.
Full specification comparison
Every spec side by side. The highlighted figure wins each row.
| Specification | RTX 2060 | GTX 1660 Ti |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | ||
| GPU / architecture | TU106-200A · Turing | TU116-400 · Turing (no RT/Tensor) |
| Process node | TSMC 12nm FFN | TSMC 12nm FFN |
| Release date | Jan 15, 2019 | Feb 22, 2019 |
| Launch MSRP | $349 | $279 ▲ |
| Compute | ||
| CUDA cores | 1,920 ▲ | 1,536 |
| RT cores | 30 · 1st gen ▲ | None |
| Tensor cores | 240 · 1st gen ▲ | None |
| Base / boost clock | 1365 / 1680 MHz | 1500 / 1770 MHz ▲ |
| L2 cache | 3 MB ▲ | 1.5 MB |
| Memory | ||
| VRAM | 6 GB GDDR6 | 6 GB GDDR6 |
| Memory bus | 192-bit | 192-bit |
| Bandwidth | 336 GB/s ▲ | 288 GB/s |
| Power & form factor | ||
| TDP | 160 W | 120 W ▲ |
| Power connector | 1× 8-pin | 1× 8-pin |
| Suggested PSU | 500 W | 450 W ▲ |
| PCIe interface | 3.0 ×16 | 3.0 ×16 |
| Features | ||
| Upscaling | DLSS 2 / Super Res + FSR ▲ | FSR / NIS only, no DLSS |
| AV1 encode (NVENC) | No | No |
| Display outputs | 3×DP1.4 · HDMI 2.0b | 3×DP1.4 · HDMI 2.0b |
Average FPS by game
Switch resolution, metric, ray tracing and upscaling, the bars update live. Hover a bar for the avg / 1% / 0.1% breakdown.
Average FPS · 1080p · Rasterization. Representative data, hover a bar for avg / 1% / 0.1%. Note the GTX 1660 Ti's 1% lows fall off at 1440p and up from its 8 GB VRAM.
Smoothness & frametimes
Average FPS hides stutter. This is one run plotted as frametime, a flat line is smooth, spikes are hitches. Watch what the GTX 1660 Ti's 8 GB VRAM does in a texture-heavy game.
Frametime: Alan Wake 2, 1080p Ultra
Lower and flatter is better · 16.7 ms = 60 fps
Counterintuitive but real: the slower RTX 2060 delivers a smoother line here because 12 GB holds the texture pool the 8 GB GTX 1660 Ti keeps evicting, those spikes are VRAM stutter, not raw speed.
Lab scores
Clean apples-to-apples tests, useful, but weaker at predicting real games than the FPS above.
Ray tracing & upscaling
Ray tracing tanks both cards at native resolution. What makes it playable is upscaling, and here the GTX 1660 Ti has a real edge.
Is frame generation "real" performance?
Neither card supports DLSS 3 Frame Generation, that feature needs the Optical Flow Accelerator hardware NVIDIA added with Ada Lovelace (RTX 40-series). DLSS on the RTX 2060 is limited to Super Resolution upscaling, and the GTX 1660 Ti has no Tensor cores at all, so it cannot run any version of DLSS.
AMD's FSR 3 Frame Generation is not hardware-locked and will run on both cards, so it is the only frame-gen path either one has. Expect a smoother-looking counter with a small latency cost, same rules apply: skip it in competitive games and don't enable it below roughly 50 base fps.
Will your CPU bottleneck these cards?
A faster GPU only helps if your CPU keeps up. Pick your CPU and resolution to see expected FPS and bottleneck for each card.
CPU + GPU pairing check
The willitbottleneck engine, built right into the comparison.
Estimated from a 43-CPU model across 1440p. A weak CPU mostly bites at 1080p; at higher resolutions the GPU becomes the limiter and the bottleneck shrinks.
Thermals & noise
The efficiency gap shows up here: the newer card runs cooler and quieter, day in and day out.
Real draw, efficiency & PSU
TDP is the rated figure; what matters is real gaming draw and how many frames you get per watt.
Both use a single 8-pin connector. If your PSU already ran the RTX 2060, it will run the GTX 1660 Ti easily. Leave about 30% headroom for spikes.
Will it fit, and what to pair it with?
Size to scale
Card length matters for small cases
What monitor to pair
GTX 1660 Ti: best at 1080p, 100-144 Hz on most titles. RTX 2060: 1080p at 144 Hz and up, or light 1440p at 60-75 Hz with settings turned down. Treat 1440p as a bonus resolution on either card, not the target.
Running an older PCIe 3.0 board?
Both run a full PCIe 3.0 ×16 link, identical interfaces, so there is no difference to weigh here. Either card also works fine dropped into a modern PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 board, or even a 3.0 ×8 slot, since neither comes close to saturating the available bandwidth.
Price history & dollars-per-frame
Raw price is only half the story. Cost per frame is the number that decides it, and it keeps moving as prices fall.
New price over time
Street price of new cards (USD)
The 6 GB vs 6 GB question
RTX 2060 · 6 GB
- 3 MB of L2 cache and 336 GB/s of bandwidth ease some of the pressure the raw 6 GB figure implies.
- Tensor cores mean local AI tools that fit in 6 GB run meaningfully faster than on the 1660 Ti.
- 6 GB is tight for modern AAA at 1080p Ultra with ray tracing or texture packs enabled.
- No more headroom than the 1660 Ti despite the extra $25 launch price, capacity is identical.
GTX 1660 Ti · 6 GB
- 6 GB GDDR6 covers the large majority of 1080p games on high settings without ray tracing.
- Lower TDP means less heat soak into the memory modules under sustained load.
- Only 288 GB/s of bandwidth, the narrowest of the group here, shows up first in emulation and RT-heavy scenes.
- No Tensor cores at all, so there is no DLSS fallback when 6 GB runs short.
Emulation & memory bandwidth
The narrower bus is a real downgrade for emulation
Both cards share the same 6 GB and 192-bit bus, so the difference comes down to raw bandwidth: 336 GB/s on the RTX 2060 against 288 GB/s on the GTX 1660 Ti. At higher internal resolutions in demanding cores like RPCS3 or Switch emulators, that gap shows up as steadier frame pacing on the 2060. Neither card's RT or Tensor hardware helps here, this is a pure bandwidth and core-count contest.
Creator, AI & streaming
The newer card is quicker per task, but the older card's extra VRAM unlocks larger jobs it can't fit at all.
Streaming: the AV1 encoder is the differentiator
Both use the same generation of NVENC with HEVC B-frame support, so encode quality per bitrate is identical. The RTX 2060's extra raw horsepower is what actually helps here, it has more headroom left over for the game itself while OBS or a capture card is running in the background. Neither card has an AV1 encoder, that arrived with Ada Lovelace.
Overclocking & undervolting
Turing has modest overclocking headroom on both chips, typically 5-8%. Undervolting is the better use of time, especially on the 160 W RTX 2060, where you can often hold the same clocks at noticeably lower power and heat.
Pros & cons
RTX 2060
- Only card here with RT cores and Tensor cores for DLSS
- About 24% faster on average across modern titles
- Higher memory bandwidth (336 GB/s) despite the same 6 GB capacity
- Draws 40 W more and needs a bigger PSU headroom
- Costs more on the used market than the 1660 Ti
GTX 1660 Ti
- 120 W TDP, easy on any PSU and small cases
- Cheapest of the two used, lowest $/frame here
- Clocks higher out of the box, 1770 MHz boost
- No RT cores or DLSS, stuck with FSR/NIS upscaling
- About 24% slower on average
- No path to ray tracing at all, on this card or any future driver
Buying pitfalls
Which RTX 2060 are you buying?
A rare 2021 re-release used a 12 GB GDDR6 configuration with 2,176 CUDA cores instead of the original 1,920-core, 6 GB card. It is uncommon on the used market but worth checking the box or GPU-Z readout before you buy, since it is a meaningfully different card.
GTX 1660 Ti vs GTX 1660 Super, don't mix them up
The 1660 Super also uses 6 GB of GDDR6 and lands close to the Ti in performance, they get confused constantly on used listings. Confirm the exact model on the box or GPU-Z, the Ti and the Super are not the same chip.
RTX 2060 vs GTX 1660 Ti: your questions answered
For most people, yes. It averages about 24% higher frame rates and is the only one of the pair with RT cores and Tensor cores for DLSS. The 1660 Ti answers back with a lower price and 40 W less heat, but it has zero ray tracing hardware.
Go with the RTX 2060 if ray tracing or DLSS matter to you at all, even occasionally. Go with the 1660 Ti if all you care about is 1080p frames per dollar and you will never turn either feature on.
Both sit at the entry-level tier by now. They handle 1080p on medium to high settings across most game libraries, though Ultra settings in current AAA titles will strain both cards, and strain the 1660 Ti a bit sooner.
Only if RT or DLSS specifically appeal to you. On its own, a roughly 24% fps bump is not a huge leap. If you are spending anyway, a used RTX 3060 stretches that budget further for a bigger generational jump.
The RTX 2060 wins here without much debate. Its Tensor cores speed up AI workloads directly, while the 1660 Ti has none and has to lean on slower general CUDA compute for the same jobs.
Encode quality ties, since both run the same NVENC generation. What separates them is headroom, the RTX 2060's extra raw power leaves more left over for the game itself while OBS or a capture card runs in the background.
The RTX 2060 supports both, DLSS 2 Super Resolution upscaling and real-time ray tracing through its RT cores. The GTX 1660 Ti has neither RT cores nor Tensor cores, which rules out DLSS and hardware ray tracing entirely, at any setting.
Neither one. That feature needs the Optical Flow Accelerator that arrived with the RTX 40-series. Both cards can fall back to AMD's FSR 3 Frame Generation instead, since that is not locked to specific hardware.
Not often. Both are entry-level GPUs, so a mid-range processor keeps pace easily. Run the pairing checker above, a Ryzen 5 3600 or Core i5-10400F or better is plenty to feed either card at 1080p.
The GTX 1660 Ti pulls ahead clearly at 120 W against the RTX 2060's 160 W, which translates to lower temperatures and a quieter fan curve under load. Both go silent at idle thanks to fan-stop.
A solid 500 W unit handles the RTX 2060 with room to spare, and 450 W is enough for the GTX 1660 Ti. A 550 W supply covers either card comfortably if you are planning a future upgrade.
Both measure around 229 mm, small enough for the great majority of cases, small-form-factor builds included. Both run a PCIe 3.0 x16 link, so there is no gap between them there, and neither one gains anything from a newer PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 board.
Yes, both do. The mobile RTX 2060 and mobile GTX 1660 Ti run at lower clocks and power limits than the desktop versions covered here, so do not line up laptop benchmarks against the desktop numbers on this page.
Not for current AAA games. Both belong in the 1080p tier, with 1440p viable in lighter or older titles. Treat 4K as off the table for this pair.
Used is really the only path left for most buyers, since new stock has dried up. A used GTX 1660 Ti around $55 is the cheapest route to a solid 1080p card; paying $75 used for the RTX 2060 is worth it if ray tracing or DLSS interest you.
NVIDIA has kept the Turing generation on its Game Ready driver branch for years after launch, and that support looks set to continue a while longer, though neither card will pick up new architecture-specific features going forward.