Synthetic Benchmarks
So to start off testing I went with a few synthetic benchmarks, mostly from 3DMark to take a look at repeatable consistent results to compare card to card performance. They don’t give you a direct idea of how good performance in game will be, but they are good for comparing cards in a few different situations like DX11 and DX12. The first tests were using the Fire Strike benchmarks which are all DX11 based. There are three tests detail levels, the performance level, extreme, and ultra each getting higher in the detail and going up from 1080p, to 1440p, then 4k. I was mostly interested in seeing how big of a performance difference the small clock speed difference (1870 MHz on the EVGA and 1830 MHz on the MSI) the two GTX 1660 Ti’s had. All three tests have the EVGA XC Ultra just slightly ahead. It wasn’t enough to close the gap between any other cards but at 1080p the RX590 and the XC Ultra are nearly the same. Then after that the 1660 Ti’s jump ahead in the other tests. The GTX 1070 is faster here in all of the tests but that changes in the next test (spoiler).
So then I switch over to Time Spy and Time Spy Extreme which are DX12 based tests. Similar to how all of the RTX cards perform better here, the GTX 1660 Ti picks up some steam. Both cards are much faster than the GTX 1070 FE here and while not up to the GTX 1070 Ti, closer to it than the GTX 1070 is to the GTX 1660 Ti. Again the XC Ultra came in ahead of the MSI Ventus XS and the original GTX 1060 along with both Polaris based RX580/RX590 cards aren’t even in the same world.
The last synthetic tests I ran weren’t in 3DMark. This time I used Unigine’s Superposition and I ran four tests here. I did 4k and 8k for ultra-high resolution tests. Then I did two tests at 1080p, one at the medium detail setting and again at 1080p with the extreme detail. This gave me a look at how turning up the detail scaled up. Now at the medium setting, the Ventus XS edged out the XC Ultra by a small amount. It was ahead in the other three tests though and with these being DX11 based tests I wasn’t surprised to find both cards coming in just behind the GTX 1070 FE and above the RX580/590 and the GTX 1060.
