At long last, Nvidia has officially unveiled the GTX 1060, the latest addition to its Pascal-based line of graphics cards. The GPU doesn’t compete with the likes of the GTX 1070 and 1080 in terms of performance — but its pricing could make it a compelling choice for consumers, given its capabilities.
Nvidia has been targeting a level of performance similar to that of the GTX 980, according to a report from AnandTech. However, the GTX 1060 should come out on top in terms of pricing and efficiency thanks to the technical and manufacturing advances that have been made since that card was released.
The GTX 1060 boasts 1,280 CUDA cores, 6GB of VRAM and a boosted clock speed of 1.7GHz. Five display outputs — a HDMI port, a DVI port, and three DisplayPort connectors — gives the user plenty of options.
However, SLI support is missing. Skeptical buyers may think this an attempt to prevent people from beating the GTX 1080’s performance at a lower price — and perhaps there’s some truth to that. But Nvidia seems generally less interested in SLI as of late. The company earlier announced it doesn’t officially support three-way and four-way SLI on the GTX 1070 and 1080.
Nvidia is launching the GTX 1060 as a means of combating AMD’s RX 480, as the two cards will be be competing for the same consumer base. Previous reports indicated that the GTX 1060 had the RX 480 beat in benchmark tests, and the specs released by Nvidia today seem to back up those findings.
The company is claiming that the GTX 1060 is “on average 15 percent faster and over 75 percent more power efficient than the closest competitive product,” presumably referring to the RX 480. The battle between these two cards looks set to be fierce, especially given Nvidia’s pricing strategy.
The GTX 1060 will launch worldwide on July 19, at the compelling price point of $250 — just ten dollars more than the going rate for the hard-to-come-by RX 480. As with the GTX 1080 and 1070, a Founders Edition variant of the card priced at $300.
Unlike those cards, the GTX 1060FE will be released alongside the normal card, and will only be sold directly from Nvidia. It’s unclear at this point what the exact differences will be between the Founder’s Edition and the “normal” variants sold by Nvidia’s partners. It may be that the FE has more video outputs, a more efficient cooler, or is faster in some as-yet-unspecified way.
For more information and full specs for the GTX 1060, head to its page on the official Nvidia website.
