NVIDIA Announces GeForce GTX 1060, Fierce Competition For the Radeon RX 480 (hothardware.com)

Reader MojoKid writes: In May, NVIDIA released the GeForce GTX 1080. The company followed up on that beastly chip in June with slightly cut down GeForce GTX 1070 and that trickledown effect is now reaching the mainstream market with the arrival of the GeForce GTX 1060. The GeForce GTX 1060 can be seen as a direct response to the AMD Radeon RX 480, which offers a ton of performance at the $200 price point. While still built using a 16nm FinFET process, the GP106 core on the GTX 1060 features 1280 CUDA cores; exactly half that of the GTX 1080. Base clock for the GPU is 1506MHz, while the boost clock is 1708MHz (NVIDIA is quick to point out, however, the GPU core can easily be overclocked to 2GHz+). The GTX 1060 features a 192-bit memory bus and comes with 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8Gbps. The card has a single 6-pin power connector and a 120W TDP. NVIDIA claims that the GTX 1060 is on average 15 percent faster than its closest competitor, the Radeon RX 480. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 will be available starting July 19th from a wide variety of third-party partners including ASUS, EVGA, Gigabyte, MSI and Zotac etc. with a starting price of $249. The NVIDIA-built GeForce GTX 1060 Founder Edition will be available for $299.

Comments

Re:Current gen vs last gen

[ranton]

I think you misunderstood the poster, they buy the mid-tier price point 2 years after release, and its no longer release price after 2 years.

That is what I thought he meant, but I don't think the logic holds up. After 2 years the new $200 cards tend to beat the previous generation which drop in price to the same price point.

Take this example, where the 1060 will be priced at about $200. Lets say that the GTX 970 soon drops to the $200 price point (its around $280 now). Based on the 1080 & 1070, the 1060 will likely have a PCMark score of around 10850 (scores). Since the 970 has a score of 8658, there doesn't seem to be any logic in going with the last generation. Based on my possibly incorrect memory, this is usually if not always the case.

It's actually not very good competition

[drinkypoo]

The GeForce GTX 1060 can be seen as a direct response to the AMD Radeon RX 480, which offers a ton of performance at the $200 price point.

I disagree strongly. I'm in the market for a new video card to replace my 750 Ti, which is currently out for RMA. It only has 1GB on it, and that's starting to be a problem for me, so I'm looking at moving up to a whole 2GB or so. I've been a fairly loyal nVidia customer basically all along; After the PowerVR and the Voodoo and Voodoo 2, I owned the TNT, and the TNT2, and went on to own every other generation of geforce from the 2 up until now. (I skipped the original, I had a Permedia 2 AGP 8GB then, which was just slightly slower but which had much better image quality.) Every so often I tried an ATI card, and the results were always disastrous. Twiddled DnA drivers made ATI cards more or less usable in the bad, sad early days of Catalyst, but they were always a bigger PITA than nVidia.

On the other hand, many people say that AMD has come a long way with the drivers, and the hardware actually seems to have offered competitive performance for some time now. In practice, the RX480 has not caused anyone any problems yet, aside from some texture flashing in water in Crysis 3 when used in a Crossfire configuration (watched the video this morning.) PCI-SIG members say that the RX480 isn't going to burn out anyone's motherboard traces or their power supply any more than any other common GPU, many of which play fast and loose with the standards. Meanwhile the 1060 doesn't support SLI, costs 20% more, and offers maybe 15% better performance. I don't see that as a credible competitor. I can buy one RX480 now (or perhaps in a few more days when the release of the 1060 knocks the price down slightly) and then pick up another one later if I want to do 4k or I find that I just need more grunt to run some game. I can't do that with the 1060.

I'm still leery of buying an AMD card, and probably will wait for partner RX480s to come out before I consider it seriously. The stock GPU cooler on the RX480 is a bit garbage, and I don't want to go to water cooling; I already have a massive air cooler in my system and plan to stick with it. But since Crysis 3 in 4k aside there seems to be no actual problem so far with even dual RX480s in crossfire and overclocked they seem to be a credible option, and I'm thinking of cuddling one of them up to my FX-8350/990FX-Gaming system real soon now, with plans for another one at a later date when they're even cheaper.

Given my history with AMD/ATI graphics, which is unfortunate, I'm still leery of this plan and might just buy one fat GPU up front, but I really don't need that much GPU right now and I don't particularly want to pay for it. But the 1060 is not even in the running if it doesn't include SLI.