Geforce GTX 1060

GTX 1060 cards now available. The rest of the market is also filling out, with inventory on most of the new GPUs in stock on a regular basis. Prices are still a bit higher than we'd like in most cases, but it's no longer impossible to buy Pascal or Polaris. One month after the official launch and preview of the 1060, things are looking much better and one can actually make some meaningful price/performance comparisons.

Let's start with online pricing, since that's often the most pressing issue for buyers. There are actually a few cards occasionally showing up at the bottom of Nvidia's suggested $250-$300 price range, with other non-Founders Edition cards priced below $300. GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 are also in stock, and like the 1060 they're also available below Founders Edition prices.

Meanwhile, AMD has launched its RX 480, RX 470, and RX 460, all going after market share with suggested prices below that of the GTX 1060; RX 480 remains overpriced right now, unfortunately. I haven't had a chance to test the RX 470 and RX 460, but performance figures elsewhere have the RX 470 trailing the RX 480 by about 15 percent; the RX 460 meanwhile is a distinctly budget GPU, sitting about 40 percent below the RX 470 and less than half the performance of the RX 480…but also half the price.

The GeForce GTX 1060 is currently the lowest tier Pascal GPU from Nvidia, occupying the $250-$300 price range. (There's bound to be a GTX 1050 at some point, of course, but officially that doesn't quite exist just yet.) Performance is supposed to be on par with the GTX 980, a card formerly priced around $500, though as we'll see below, in many cases the 980 still wins. Looking to the future, however, upcoming games may leverage some of the hardware features baked into Pascal to extract more performance. We saw this happen with the Maxwell GTX 900 series over time, where initial parity with the existing Kepler GTX 700 series cards eventually ended up being a relatively large performance advantage for Maxwell.

Much like the other Pascal GPUs, GTX 1060 is able to increase clock speeds relative to the previous generation by a healthy margin—30 to 45 percent compared to the GTX 960, to be precise. Combined with 25 percent more CUDA cores and 15 percent higher memory clocks, along with a 50 percent wider memory bus, the resulting performance is at times more than twice as fast. Perhaps more impressively, all of this extra performance comes without increasing the power requirements, so a single 6-pin PEG connector is sufficient (though some custom overclocked cards will include an 8-pin connector).

But since we just finished talking about prices, much like the RX 480 we have to temper our enthusiasm slightly. The GTX 1060 is a worthy successor to the GTX 960, but pricing has increased by at least $50, if not $100, which means in some ways it's really more of a replacement for the GTX 970. And if you're currently running a GTX 970, the performance increase isn't really that large right now.

New features like simultaneous multi-projection make this the better card, and if you're upgrading graphics cards then you're more likely looking at replacing something from the GTX 700 era, if not a GTX 600/500 series card (or an AMD equivalent like the R9 280/HD 7950). At $250 this is a nice card, but budget-minded gamers are more likely to be swayed by the sub-$200 prices on RX 470—or wait and see what the GTX 1050 has to offer at some point in the future.

One final tidbit that might sway buyers into opting for the more expensive GTX 1070/1080 is that Nvidia doesn't support SLI on the GTX 1060. This might seem like a major problem, but in practice most users I've encountered typically don't do SLI (or CF) unless they're already using a high-end graphics card. Still, it does give AMD's RX 480 a potential advantage for dual-GPU systems.

The lack of SLI support also goes along with Nvidia's message on the GTX 1080/1070, where they specifically recommend against going beyond two GPUs at this point. It's still possible to do so—and you could always add a third GPU for PhysX, though there aren't really enough PhysX enabled games around to make that a compelling argument—but going forward it looks like dual-GPUs is now the recommended 'maximum' configuration. Of course game developers are free to use low-level APIs (DX12 and Vulkan) and features like explicit multi-adapter to take advantage of multiple GPUs—Ashes of the Singularity does this—but so far developers haven't been eager to do so.

Check out more here: http://www.pcgamer.com/geforce-gtx-1060-review