On the AMD side, we’re mostly interested in Radeon RX 590, although Radeon RX Vega 64 and Radeon RX Vega 56 make for interesting additions, too.
How many people are actually interested in the RX 590? It launched at too high a price to be considered a good value relative to AMD's existing lineup. The real card to compare against should have been the RX 580, which offers around 90-95% of an RX 590's performance and 8GB of VRAM for as little as $180. Sure, it's obviously not going to perform on the level of a 1660 Ti, but that card costs around 55% more, making the RX 580 at least better in terms of performance per dollar, for those who don't feel they need to spend $100 more for the additional performance.
The RX 590 needed to drop closer to $200 to be worth considering even before the 1660 Ti came on the scene, but now it needs that more than ever. It should have been launched for far less to begin with if AMD actually wanted it to compete. Matching the RX 580's $230 launch price from a year and a half prior would have been the sensible thing to do considering the minimal performance gains over that card.
AMD apparently dropped the MSRP of Vega 56 to $279 the other day, though I still don't actually see any models for sale anywhere close to that price. Considering those cards are likely still fairly expensive to manufacture, with their 8GB of HBM2, I'm not entirely convinced that they will be widely available for that price. A sub-$300 Vega 56 would provide some very strong competition against the 1660 Ti though, at least for anyone willing to put up with the extra 100 watts of power draw under load, and the extra heat and noise that results.
How low an FPS is playable is a personal opinion, just like how much detail can be sacrificed for better FPS. I don't mind sacrificing however much detail is necessary to stay above 50fps most of the time on my GTX1050 since most details get blurred by movement during actual game play anyway. I'll worry about higher details when a substantial upgrade (as in double the performance or better) becomes available for ~$200.
Um... An RX 580 already offers double the performance of a GTX 1050 for under $200. >_>
I agree that high detail settings are not so important in many games though, particularly in multiplayer titles where the atmosphere of a game often tends to be less important than smooth performance. Playing any game with a first-person perspective at around 30fps tends to not be a pleasant experience though.
Back to the 1660 Ti, overall I would consider its performance to be underwhelming given its price, but that was expected given the rest of Nvidia's new lineup. These performance gains are rather mediocre considering it's been the better part of 3 years since the 10-series launched. The performance of the 1660 Ti might have been okay at the same $250 MSRP the 1060 launched for, but for $30 more without the new raytracing features that nvidia has been so heavily pushing? Meh. It's only $20 less than what you have been able to get a GTX 1070 for lately, and while it's yet to be seen how their performance will compare down the line, the reduction in VRAM may counter the card's architectural improvements. Also, there's supposedly going to be a 1660 non-Ti coming soon to more accurately fill the price range of the 1060, and indications are that performance will be roughly in between that of a 1060 and a 1070. Again, not at all impressive gains considering it's been almost 3 years since those cards came out.
Yes, I totally agree with you. We will endeavor to include links to comments in more articles, if not all.
I've also been wondering why there isn't a link in every article. This site typically only publishes around 10 or so articles a day, so it doesn't seem like it would be that hard to manually add a forum post and a link to each one.
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