[Review] GTX 1060 Has Arrived

Two months after its debut, Nvidia’s Pascal architecture is slowly filling out the company’s desktop graphics card portfolio from top to bottom. First came the GeForce GTX 1080, serving up 30%+ more performance than a GeForce GTX 980 Ti for less money. Now we’re getting a third Pascal-based board in the GeForce GTX 1060. Announced earlier this month, we already know that Nvidia’s partners will have versions starting at $250. The Founders Edition implementation will sell for $300 on nvidia.com.

Specs

The GeForce GTX 1060 is built on the same Pascal microarchitecture and 16nm FinFET production process as the GTX 1080 and 1070 before it, but it’s not based on the same GP104 GPUs as its older siblings. Instead, it uses Nvidia’s new GP106 GPU, which is tuned for power efficiency.

Houses GP106 GPU

GeForce GTX 1060 is based on a brand new GPU called GP106 that exposes many of the same features as GP104, but in a more mainstream package. Don’t let that term dissuade you, though. The 1060 may be a mere 120W card, but Nvidia says it’s good for GeForce GTX 980-class frame rates. Two years ago, that level of performance sold for $550. Nvidia builds its flagship GeForce GTX 1080 using a complete GP104 processor with four Graphics Processing Clusters enabled. This yields a card with 2560 CUDA cores and 160 texture units. The GTX 1070 centers on the same GPU with three of its GPCs turned on, adding up to 1920 cores and 120 texture units.

No SLI!

Notice the lack of an SLI connector up top? Nvidia recommends a GeForce GTX 1070 or 1080 to gamers looking for more performance than a 1060 delivers (of course), and does not support SLI on the 1060. Generationally, this is the highest-end board we can recall without the technology. Sure, the GeForce GTX 750 Ti didn't have it, but the 760 did. So too did the GeForce GTX 950. Officially, Nvidia internalizes the decision. There aren't many gamers who pair up mainstream GPUs, and the company doesn't want to spread resources thin, so it's focusing on optimizing SLI on faster Pascal-based cards. Beyond that explanation, though, game development is going a different direction with post-processing and compute-oriented effects that aren't friendly to alternate-frame rendering. And with DirectX 12, more control is shifted to ISVs eager to get their content out as quickly as possible. That means much of the work Nvidia pours into its drivers is circumvented.

Benchmarks

Here is a benchmark score of 1060 done by Gamespot:

For my test bench, I’m using the same system that I used to review Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 GPUs. It’s a rig with an Intel Core i7-5930K Haswell-E CPU clocked at 3.9GHz, coupled with 16GB of DDR4 RAM clocked at 2133MHz running in quad-channel mode. Since Nvidia claims the GTX 1060 is as fast as the GeForce GTX 980 and 15 percent faster than AMD’s Radeon RX 480, I’ll be reviewing it against those two cards. I’ll also be comparing it against the GTX 1060’s more expensive siblings, the GTX 1080 and 1070, to see how it stacks up to the rest of Nvidia’s Pascal family.

Conclusion

While Nvidia is marketing the GeForce GTX 1060 as a capable graphics card to run 1080p games maxed out, it can also handle many 1440p games well. According to my numbers, the $300 graphics card runs 1.6 percent faster than the GTX 980--which is a card that you’ll still find online for roughly $100 more. While it isn’t always faster than the GTX 980, my tests do validate Nvidia’s assertions that the two cards are generally comparable.


Author : Saatvik Awasthi