Some in the PC-gaming community might see the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, Nvidia's first GTX-branded (versus RTX-branded) "Turing" GPU, as Nvidia's admission that the world wasn't ready so soon for the ray-tracing features in its RTX line. But video cards are roadmapped much further out than just a few months. So while this graphics card takes Nvidia's RTX tech a step backward, removing some of its future-looking flagship elements, that was the plan all along. The result is a chopped-down, smoothed-out Turing-architecture card that emphasizes value for players today. Few can afford $500-plus for a muscle card, and the GTX 1660 Ti fills the needs of a specific subset of gamers (online multiplayer enthusiasts who need high refresh rates) but also holds its own against slightly more expensive cards like the GeForce RTX 2060 with older AAA titles. In its $309 MSI-made form we tested, it's a winner in a price band close to, but discrete from, that of the also-excellent, Editors' Choice-winning RTX 2060 Founders Edition.

When Nvidia announced their latest line of Pascal-based graphics cards, the world was forever changed. The company had managed to do the impossible in a post-Moore’s Law world by simultaneously doubling the performance of their previous lineup, cutting the cost in half, and doing it all in classic Nvidia style by running another set of victory laps around AMD .

With the announcement of the Pascal generation of Nvidia graphics cards coming out this summer, many AMD fans were left wondering “what’s next for us?”. Smartly, it seems that instead of trying to directly compete with the likes of the GTX 1080 high-end cards, the latest Polaris variants of AMD’s cards have their sights set squarely on the budget-oriented gamer, those who need the most performance possible out of their gaming desktop and don’t want to drop an arm and a leg to get it.