NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660

The GTX 1660's strongest measured trait is frames per $100 at 13.8 fps/$100, which puts it in the 45th percentile — that metric describes raw frames bought per hundred dollars, before any age weighting. Its weakest is frames per watt at 0.25 fps/W (19th percentile). The spread is narrow, so the card behaves consistently across workloads rather than trading one strength for one weakness.

The GTX 1660 turns a 120W board power budget into 30.3 fps at 1440p, or 0.25 fps/W against a pool median of 0.32 fps/W. Power, not transistor count, is the binding constraint on a modern GPU — Dennard scaling stopped holding around 2005, and Esmaeilzadeh and colleagues showed at ISCA 2011 that the fraction of a chip that can be powered at full speed shrinks with every node (“dark silicon”). Frames per watt is the shortest honest summary of what an architecture is doing with that budget.

For scale: the closest NVIDIA card from an earlier generation is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (2016), at 33.1 fps and 150W. The GTX 1660 is 8% slower while drawing 30W less.

Every rendered pixel has to be fed from memory. At 1440p the GTX 1660 has 1,719 B/px of memory bandwidth available per pixel it draws, against a median of 1,808 B/px — roughly in balance for its performance class. This is the roofline model applied to a game frame: Williams, Waterman and Patterson (Communications of the ACM, 2009) showed that any workload runs into either a compute ceiling or a memory-bandwidth ceiling, and that the ratio of the two is what decides which one you hit.

On memory capacity, the GTX 1660 carries 6GB against a median of 8GB across the 5 other cards within 10% of its 1440p frame rate. It has less memory than the cards it competes with on speed, which is the constraint to watch: a card fast enough to run high texture settings but short on VRAM to hold them stutters rather than slows.

Method: percentiles are computed over the 77 non-legacy cards with a 1440p figure. Frame rates come from Tom's Hardware GPU hierarchy; specifications from manufacturer datasheets. Theoretical FP32 TFLOPS is deliberately not used as a cross-vendor comparison — RDNA 3 and 4 dual-issue FP32 doubles the paper figure without doubling game performance, and AMD itself declined to count it as extra shaders. The measured Steel Nomad score is used as the compute proxy instead. GPURanker does not run its own benchmarks.