Yep, it looks like the GTX 1660 Ti is definitely a thing that's happening

After the spilling of some official presentation slide beans at the end of January, it would appear the Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti is very much on its way after a swathe of retail boxes have been spotted in the wild. Packed with Nvidia's next-gen Turing GPU but allegedly no ray tracing support, the current rumour mill pegs the release of the GTX 1660 Ti as soon as February 22 (that's next Friday), which is a little later than the previous estimate of this Friday, February 15, but still pretty damn soon. Is the GTX 1660 Ti the low-end GTX 1060, or indeed GTX 1050 Ti successor we've been waiting for? Here's everything we know so far from the latest set of leaky marketing pipes.

So far, there have been sightings of GTX 1660 Ti boxes from Galax, Palit and EVGA, according to the eagle-eyed folks over at Hexus and VideoCardz. Both the Galax and Palit boxes would appear to confirm the GTX 1660 Ti will come with 6GB of GDDR6 memory, while all three of them make special mention of having 'Turing Shaders' in the little row of extra features down the bottom.

However, the equally eagle-eyed among you will recall that the boxes for Nvidia's RTX graphics card boxes have 'RAY TRACING' plastered across this bit where it says 'GDDR6, DirectX 12 and Ansel', which would suggest that while the GTX 1660 Ti will indeed have a Turing-based GPU (hence the shaders), its RT or ray tracing Cores are very much absent. Whether it will still support other RTX features such as DLSS is currently unknown, but if I were to guess I'd probably say not, given how Nvidia have now wrapped all those features together as 'RTX' in their various RTX On/Off demos and such.

I still think having a GTX 16-series is an immensely confusing move given how we've already got a multitude of various 10-series cards muddying the waters of the great generational graphics card divide, but what can you do in the face of Nvidia's global marketing department, eh?

Anyway, one final interesting thing to note is that while the Galax card pictured above is a dual-fan card, the Palit and EVGA models only show single-fan coolers. Again, based off nothing but my own speculation, this would lead me to believe the GTX 1660 Ti might be more of a GTX 1050 Ti replacement than a GTX 1060 successor. Still, if Hexus' proposed release date of February 22 is to be believed, then we won't have to wait very long to find out.