Radeon RX 6500 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 — Specs & Performance Compared

Verdict: The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 leads on 4 of 6 shared benchmarks (12% in 3DMark Time Spy); the Radeon RX 6500 takes 2 (16% in 3DMark Fire Strike). On llama2:7b, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 generates 41.4 tokens/s (per llama.cpp GitHub (discussion #15013)) against 27.8 for the Radeon RX 6500 (per llama.cpp GitHub Discussions), best community run on file for each.

Side-by-side GPU comparison of the Radeon RX 6500 and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660. Specs, synthetic benchmarks, AI inference tok/s, and Amazon availability below; each column header links to that part's benchmark page.

AMD · RDNA 2

Radeon RX 6500

4 GB VRAM55W TDP

Full Radeon RX 6500 benchmarks →

NVIDIA · Turing

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660

6 GB VRAM120W TDP$219 MSRP2019

Full NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 benchmarks →

*Price sourced from Amazon.com. Price and availability subject to change.

Where to buy

A listing for each part; the current price and stock are on the retailer's page.

Specs side-by-side

Spec	Radeon RX 6500	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660
vram gb	4	6
vram type	GDDR6	GDDR5
tdp w	55	120
cuda cores	1024	1408
process nm	6	—

Synthetic benchmarks

Each row says whether a higher or a lower number is better (ranks and times are lower-is-better). Scores come from 3DMark, Notebookcheck, Forbes / Tirias Research, CpuTronic, TopCPU.net, Legit Reviews, GPU-Monkey, PassMark and AskGeek.io; each row links its sources, and where they differ the cell shows their median. Empty cells mean we don't yet have that benchmark on file for the SKU.

Benchmark	Radeon RX 6500	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660
3DMark Fire Strike (higher is better) Source: 3DMark, Notebookcheck	14,368 points	12,365 points
3DMark Fire Strike Extreme (higher is better) Source: Notebookcheck, Forbes / Tirias Research	6,213 points	—
3DMark Steel Nomad (higher is better) Source: 3DMark, CpuTronic	317 points	1,047 points
3DMark Time Spy (higher is better) Source: TopCPU.net, Notebookcheck, Forbes / Tirias Research, CpuTronic, 3DMark, Legit Reviews	4,942 points	5,521 points
3DMark Time Spy Graphics (higher is better) Source: Notebookcheck, GPU-Monkey	4,942 points	5,395 points
PassMark G2D Mark (higher is better) Source: PassMark	818 pts	776 pts
PassMark G3D Mark (higher is better) Source: PassMark, AskGeek.io	7,621 pts	11,618 pts

AI inference (tokens/sec)

Top community-reported tokens-per-second results for popular LLMs whose weights fit the card's memory, each linked to its source. See the per-SKU benchmark page for the full set including quantization and prompt length.

Radeon RX 6500

llama3.2:3b: 39.8 tok/s (geerlingguy/ai-benchmarks (GitHub))
llama2:7b: 27.8 tok/s (llama.cpp GitHub Discussions)
llama2:7b: 27.8 tok/s (llama.cpp GitHub Discussion #10879)

All Radeon RX 6500 AI benchmarks →

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660

qwen3:0.6b: 47.1 tok/s (LocalLLaMA)
llama2:7b: 41.4 tok/s (llama.cpp GitHub (discussion #15013))
llama2:7b: 41.4 tok/s (llama.cpp GitHub (CUDA performance scoreboard))

All NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 AI benchmarks →

Quick answers

Which is faster, the Radeon RX 6500 or the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660?

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 leads on 4 of 6 shared benchmarks (12% in 3DMark Time Spy); the Radeon RX 6500 takes 2 (16% in 3DMark Fire Strike).

Which is better for running local LLMs?

On llama2:7b, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 generates 41.4 tokens/s (per llama.cpp GitHub (discussion #15013)) against 27.8 for the Radeon RX 6500 (per llama.cpp GitHub Discussions), best community run on file for each.