On Wednesday, July 6, Nvidia revealed the GeForce GTX 1060, its rival to AMD's cheap and powerful Radeon RX 480.
According to PC World, the GTX 1060 will be available on the market starting July 19, in both custom and reference versions. After we have already seen two major new video cards from Nvidia, the mid-range GeForce GTX 1070 and the powerhouse 1080, now the company has a cheap new option to AMD's $200 RX 480.
The GTX 1060 comes with a price tag of $249 and it claims to be just as fast as Nvidia's flagship GTX 980 sold initially for $549. On July 19, the GTX 1060 will launch in custom versions from partners like EVGA, ASUS and Gigabyte. Nvidia is also offering, just like with its past two cards, a "Founders Edition" for a premium of $299.
According to Engadget, the GTX 1060 is built on Nvidia's 16 nanometer Pascal architecture. It seems that the video card shows all the performance benefits of the smaller manufacturing process, given its performance claims.
The GeForce GTX 1060 works at a clock speed of 1.7 GHz and packs in 6 GB of GDDR5 RAM. The base clock speed was not announced yet by Nvidia at this point, but same as with the past cards, it is likely to be a few hundred megahertz slower. According to Nvidia claims, the card will be easily overclockable to 2 GHz.
The 1060 will feature NVIDIA's parallel processing technology, working on 1,280 CUDA cores, compared to 2,560 in the 1080 and 1,920 cores in the GTX 1070. NVIDIA claims the 1060 can still be faster than the 2014's 980 thanks to its faster memory and processor.
The 1060 will also feature Nvidia's "simultaneous multi-projection" technology that lets allows the company's new Pascal graphic cards handle virtual reality efficiently. While AMD still beats Nvidia in overall value with the $200 RX 480, it is expected that many gamers would gravitate to the $239 version of RX 480 video card with 8 GB of memory. And at that point, Nvidia's $249 GTX 1060 becomes a direct competitor.
