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NVIDIA's GTX 1660 Ti offers gaming power without ray-tracing for $279

It'll perform as well as the GTX 1070 for less money.

NVIDIA has officially unveiled the much-leaked GTX 1660 Ti. It's a next-gen Turing card that lacks the RTX-series' ray tracing, but costs less and boosts performance over the last-generation GTX 1060. The new cards come with 6GB of GDDR6 RAM running at 12Gbps, 1,536 CUDA cores and a 1.8GHz boost clock speed that allows further overclocking. It'll deliver 1.5 times the performance of the GTX 1060 6GB card, with 1.4 times the power efficiency -- fast enough to power games like Fortnite, PUBG and Apex Legends at 120 fps/1080p.

NVIDIA has been criticized a fair bit over the pricing of its RTX 20-series GPUs. They don't offer a significant boost over the last generation and the main feature you're paying for -- ray tracing -- is only available in a couple of games. At the same, time, they're pricier than the last generation. For instance, the RTX 2060 cost $100 more than the GTX 1060 did at launch.

NVIDIA's pitch for the new cards, then, is value. The GTX 1660 Ti should offer about the same performance as a GTX 1070, while costing less. At the same time, the $349 RTX 2060 will outperform it, though, as it has more CUDA cores (1,920) and a higher 14 Gbps memory speed. NVIDIA has promised that "plenty" of GTX 1660 Ti boards will be available at launch today from ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, PNY and other manufactures. They'll start at $279, or £260 in the UK.