Today, Nvidia (or more accurately, its card partners) dropped its latest graphics cards based on the Turing architecture, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti family.

The GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is Nvidia's attempt to bridge the gap between gamers who are still on GeForce 9XX (or AMD Radeon RX 400-series) cards but still don't want to drop the significant chunk of change they'd need to break into the premium-level GeForce RTX line.

Cards in the GeForce RTX family start at $349, in various GeForce RTX 2060 cards from Nvidia itself and its board partners. (See, for example, our review of the Zotac GeForce RTX 2060 Amp.) The new GeForce GTX 1660 Ti cards start at $279 in reference-card form.

The main idea behind the launch of the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti? Nvidia is offering all the improvements that came with the development of Nvidia's "Turing" (the architecture upon which the GeForce RTX series is also based) without saddling the card with the pricier extras—notably, the deep-learning and ray-tracing cores—that add to the costs associated with RTX cards.

In essence, the card is a bridge between the RTX line and the older "Pascal" cards that have dominated the mainstream market for the past several years.