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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.

14 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. It will only be competition if you can find it in by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The GTX 1080 and 1070 have been consistently out if stock.

  2. Niiiiice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    TuxRacer is going to SCREEEEEEAM on this card sliding down those mountains!

  3. Re:Which is recommended for Linux gaming? by wkwilley2 · · Score: 2

    I just switched to Linux about six months ago with my R9 280 and it was relatively painless.

    It wasn't really any different than installing drivers on windows besides the couple of prerequisite files I needed to check for in the terminal.

    --
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  4. Re:Current gen vs last gen by ranton · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
  5. Re:Enough horsepower to run an Oculus Rift well? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Enough horsepower to run an Oculus Rift well?"

    Quoting from the The Rift’s Recommended Spec:
    "For the full Rift experience, we recommend the following system: NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater"

    Ars Technica writes "Faster than a GTX 980".
    PCworld even uses the title "GTX 1060 is a $250 GTX 980 killer".

    So, yes, it's easily enough to use the Rift.
    And the HTC Vive for that matter.

  6. GloFo 14nm vs TSMC 16nm by Ecuador · · Score: 2

    Anybody has any idea whether GloFo's 14nm FinFET has some sort of disadvantage vs TSMC's 16nm? Otherwise it looks quite bad for the AMD engineers when they have to use more power than a much faster GTX 1070 and also max out at around 1.3GHz when nVidia pulls 2GHz...
    And this is from a longtime AMD/ATI fan, mainly because I attribute to AMD/ATI the fact that through the competition they kept Intel & nVidia coming up with new stuff at decent price points, so it saddens me to see them lagging behind the last few years...

    --
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    1. Re:GloFo 14nm vs TSMC 16nm by Tough+Love · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Anybody has any idea whether GloFo's 14nm FinFET has some sort of disadvantage vs TSMC's 16nm? Otherwise it looks quite bad for the AMD engineers when they have to use more power than a much faster GTX 1070...

      AMD's product is released and independently tested while nVidia's is only announced, so take those claims with a grain of salt. I believe the technical term for the situation is "FUD". Even if you accept nVidia's claims at face value, the 480 still comes out as great value and is shipping now. I guess the market agrees because the initial production run seems to be mostly sold out.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  7. It's actually not very good competition by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    --
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    1. Re:It's actually not very good competition by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Informative

      Two cards in SLI do not provide 100% more performance than one card; on average maybe 80% more, depending on game and resolution.

      Looks like it's closer to 90% for the RX480s.

      I see that you want the option to upgrade, but if you eventually want 2x1060 in SLI just buy a 1080 for the same number of cores. It's 20% more expensive

      This is why I'm looking at an AMD card again... because nVidia's answer is always "spend more money"

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  8. Re:Which is recommended for Linux gaming? by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Which of these are recommended for Linux gaming? I like to buy AMD when I can, but in the past, the Radeon drivers were hell to deal with, compared to NVIDIA.

    That's basically still how it is. The Linux driver performance is substantially worse than the Windows driver. You should stick with nVidia for gaming on Linux. I am only using ye olde Asus GTS 450 OC on my Linux box, but it works a treat. I am a cheap bastard so my Windows box only has a 1GB Zotac 750Ti, which is currently out for RMA.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  9. Holding out for fanless by pjrc · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hopefully soon they'll follow up with an even lower power 1050 card.

    I always buy the very best fanless card for my Linux (no games) deskop. When a better one comes along, I buy it.

  10. Re:Which is recommended for Linux gaming? by D.McG. · · Score: 3, Interesting

    LOL Complications?
    Valve: OpenGL is faster than DirectX — even on Windows (20% faster)
    Bringing Unreal Engine 4 to OpenGL
    The only reason developers should consider DirectX at this point is if they need to run on an XBONE.

  11. Re:15% performance increase by Anubis+IV · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The article says, "NVIDIA claims that the GTX is on average 15 percent faster than its closest competitor (i.e. the Radeon RX 480)", leaving it ambiguous as to which model they were referring. Given the pricing (4GB 480 for $200, 8GB 480 for $240, 6GB 1060 for $250), we'd assume that the 15% increase would be over the $240 RX 480, since it's the closest competitor in terms of price, but NVIDIA may be using some coy phrasing to compare the 1060 against a fictional mid-level RX 480 that averages the capabilities of the 4GB and 8GB models.

    If it really is achieving a 15% increase over the $240 RX 480, then that's substantial, especially so considering that it does so "while also being over 75 percent more power efficient [than its closest competitor]", because at that point you'd be paying just $10 for a noticeable performance boost that would pay for itself over time from power savings. They'd sweep the legs completely from underneath the high-end 480. But if it's actually just 15% faster than a fictional, mid-level model or the 4GB model, that's substantially less impressive.

    I'm eagerly awaiting the benchmarks.

  12. Re:Which is recommended for Linux gaming? by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

    To answer your question though, I've heard through the vine that Nvidia drivers are easier to deal with on Linux, though I have not experienced it firsthand.

    The AMD proprietary drivers (fglrx/catalyst) are roughly equivalent to nVidia in terms of stability and upgrade hassle, while the AMD open source driver (Radeon/AMDGPU) is the least hassle experience. Maybe Valve knows this for sure, but my impression is that most Linux AMD users stick with the default open source driver these days because the performance gap has closed up to the point that convenience outweighs it. Personally, I have had zero issues with the AMD open source drivers for several years on a variety of systems and haven't felt any motivation to switch in the closed source drivers, though some people might care if they need the latest OpenGL version right now, or more throughput for some corner case. Basically, reasons for using the closed AMD driver are fading away fast and likely will be gone completely in the current development cycle where we expect Vulkan and OpenGL 4.5 to land in the open source stack.

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.