AMD Radeon RX Vega 11 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Super (Desktop) vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 (Desktop)

AMD Radeon RX Vega 11

The AMD Radeon RX Vega 11 is an integrated GPU in the Ryzen desktop APUs (e.g. Ryzen 5 2400G) that were launched early 2018. The graphics card is based on the Vega architecture (5th generation GCN) and has all 11 CUs (=704 shaders) clocked at up to 1240 MHz (Ryzen 5 2400G). The GPU benefits from fast dual-channel DDR4-2400 RAM (contrary to DDR4-2133 single-channel, which is also possible).

The Vega architecture offers some improvements over the Polaris generation and now supports DirectX 12 Feature Level 12_1. More information is available in our dedicated article about the Raven Ridge architecture.

According to a first 3DMark Fire Strike that was published by AMD, the Vega 11 offers a similiar theoretical performance as the older dedicated Radeon R9 M280X. In games the missing dedicated graphics memory may however prove to be a bottleneck. Therefore, modern and demanding games will only be playable in lowest settings and the APU is mostly intended for lower demanding games like Overwatch, Dota 2, ...

Thanks to the 14nm process and clever power-saving features, the power consumption is comparatively low. The high TDP of 65 Watt of the APU however should lead to a much higher power consumption compared to the mobile APUs with 15 Watt TDP.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Super (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 Super for desktops is an entry-level gaming graphics card based on the Turing architecture. The chip, which has been named TU116, was introduced in November 2019. The GTX 1650 series does not offer ray tracing and tensor cores, unlike the more powerful RTX 2000 cards (e.g. RTX 2060). Performance is slightly better than with the GeForce GTX 1650 and comparable with the AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT.

There have also been significant improvements in the Turing architecture in terms of the CUDA cores. Float and INT operations can now be executed simultaneously, the cache has been unified and improved, and Adaptive Shading has been introduced. As a result, Nvidia speaks of an up to 50% higher performance per core compared to Pascal.

The new entry-level card benefits from the advantages of the TU116 chip, since the newer NVENC video encoding delivers more performance compared to Pascal.

Nvidia specifies a power consumption of 100 watts TGP (Total Graphics Power) for the graphics card. The TU11 chip is manufactured by TSMC in a 12 nm FFN process.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 (Desktop)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 is a mid-tier, Turing-based, desktop GPU. The GTX 1660 relies on the TU116 chip with 1,408 shader units, 48 ROPs, 88 TMUs and a 192-bit-wide memory bus (clocked at 2 GHz = 8 GHz effectively 12 GHz, bandwidth: up to 192.1 GB/s).

The TU116 chip and other Turing-based GPUs are produced using the 12-nm manufacturing process. However, the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti does not offer the latest features such as DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and Real Time Ray Tracing. Nevertheless, there are some architectural improvements when it comes to floating point and integer performance. These operations can now be carried out simultaneously. Other notable features include Adaptive Shading, unified cache, DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) as well as H.265 encoding and decoding (PlayReady 3.0).

At Full HD resolution, the GeForce GTX 1660 is slightly faster than the old GeForce GTX 1060, but clearly slower than the old GeForce GTX 1070 (and GTX 1660 Ti). Therefore, the GTX1660 is well suited for demanding games of 2019 in 1080p and high - max details (see gaming benchmarks below).

The energy consumption of the GeForce GTX 1660 amounts to 120 watts (like the 1660 Ti or GTX 1060).