welcome back to our search to find a new minimum spec graphics card for star citizen
we've decided that the 1060 is probably on its way out the clouds make it a bit tricky
so we've been testing last week we had a lot of amd cars this week we are on to the nvidia 1660
series i've got all three we've got the original 1660 that's got ddr5 then we've got the 1660 super
that has got ddr6 but it's effectively the same card but the memory bandwidth is just a lot faster
there's just much more bandwidth and speed of the memory this card was a nightmare because it came
with a mining bios because somebody had been mining the heck out of it so there's a little
bit of an asterisk by this card and the results because i think it's probably degraded a bit over
time but you'll see as we get to the results and then finally probably the thickest graphics card
i've ever seen it's thicker than my 3080 this is a 1660 ti which has more uh shaders than the 1660
other two but it's actually got slower memory ddr6 memory than the super so nvidia has decided
to make this about as complicated as they possibly can but anyway we've got all that we're going to
see how they perform and see if they can be the next minimum spec graphics card let's get into
it so a quick reminder of the test setup we've got a 5800x3d which basically means everything
is gpu bottleneck because that cpu is so fast it's amazing it changes the game for
star citizen and then we've got 32 years of ram we've got then these various graphics cards and
it's been tested on 317.1 all the same patch all the same drivers a lot of sort of stuff
very high graphics everything else default clouds on medium unless i say not and vsync off motion
blur off and film grain on let's start off in space you'll see here that these three cars all
perform fairly significantly better than the cars from last week the 1060 and the 5500 xt
eight gig and four gigabyte you'll see this is the order that they're meant to be in 1660
is a bit slow in the super and the ti is a bit faster than that and that will stay consistent
although some of the super results i think are probably a bit lower than you might want to expect
quantum travel follows the same pattern a good increase over the 1060
but quantum travel itself is quite graphically intensive so these cars that were doing 100 fps
when you're really really being pushed in this sort of environment are getting down to the 40s
but for a minimum spec very playable very good area 18 is quite an interesting result because
the super is pretty close to the ti and quite a long way ahead of the 1660. this could be
the faster memory in the super which remember is faster than actually the memory in the ti
and it's ddr gddr6 versus gddr5 in the 1660. but again all good results nothing to complain about
here on the rooftop of orison and you'll see again we're in order nothing really to shout about here
maybe that super result seems a bit too close to the 1660 but on the whole again good good result
and then we move on to lourville where i've done the majority of the testing lots and lots and lots
of runs we've got pretty good performance they're all of 30 fps they all do have moments where they
drop below 30 but they're all pretty playable what's interesting here is that actually some
of the drops i think we might be seeing a bit of a memory issue all of these cars have got six
gigabytes of ram but there's big parts of this run that through louisville where they seem to have
the same sorts of drops that the four gigabyte 5500 xt had and also sometimes the 1060 kits
if you look at the one percent lows they're all pretty low and so i i'm not happy to necessarily
end the search right here because i really want to see what the 1070 does the 1070 probably will
perform relatively close to the 1660 ti maybe above it in some parts below it and others
but i want to see if that eight gigabytes of memory makes a difference because i'll
show you here a bit of a bit of footage from one of the runs this is a particularly bad one
as you go through laurelville there'll be various parts where suddenly you just see a big drop and
i'm convinced it must be linked to the memory you look at the big red bit of memory here where it's
swapping things in and out i think even though crg are saying that they're targeting four
gigabytes i think that's really out of the tape out there off the table at this point but i think
maybe even six gigabytes just in louisville i mean again this could be down to all sorts of things
this time it won't be down to pcie lanes because these cars have got uh pci 316 so that won't be
the issue but i just think there's something going on here that might just be specific to
louisville and actually cigr looking to rework uh lorville so that might change things a bit but
i think we're in some interesting territory where it'd be really interesting to see what
the 1070 can do next time because yeah that it'll have slower memory but well i wonder if it will
have the same drops because it's got more memory and for anybody who again doesn't care about the
clouds and wants to turn them off here are the results from norville if you turn the clouds off
so that's the results of today we're pretty close i think any three of those if it wasn't for that
memory issue could be the new minimum spec gpu the ti is obviously significantly faster than
the 1660 and the supers in the middle but if you were to if you have one of those cars the game i'd
say is very playable the the parts of the game that i test are kind of worst case scenarios so
that bit in area 18 the rest of variation when you're not looking at that scene particularly
looking at the globe the rest of our 1818 is quite straightforward to run and you get some
fairly good frames with a good cpu but i imagine they'll add clouds to area 18 before too long and
that will probably dip it down again um and then yeah the law will run and the origin bit they're
they're hard parts of the game for the for the gpu so other parts of the game if you're out in
space doing some missions or if you're even doing some combat in space these cars will be great and
i think i think any of them i think i need to i really want to see how the 1070 does and then
also maybe get a 5600 xt from amd just to see where that slots in but i would be tempted to
say at this stage that the 1660 straight playing one would be a good starting point for anybody the
tricky thing yeah is whether you want to go out and buy a six gigabyte card if there's already
some issues and maybe as the game develops i just don't see how crg are going to stick to their
four gigabyte minimum respect it just doesn't seem at this point to be doable now and i don't
see how as the game progresses and they develop and put in more and more i'm just not sure but
we've also remember got the vulcan stuff and the gen 12 stuff that will affect memory management
and things like that so anyway lots of stuff there i think some really interesting numbers in
that one and we're building up a picture of what graphics cards are good at this sort of lower end
range and relatively cheap so there we go that's enough of this one i'll see you soon bye