Nvidia announces GTX 1060

July 7, 2016 | 13:58

Tags: #gtx-1060 #pascal #rx-480

Companies: #nvidia

Nvidia has today officially announced the GTX 1060, along with all the relevant high level specifications and the US MSRP.

The GTX 1060 will be available from July 19, which is also when you'll see reviews, including ours, go live. In terms of MSRP, it has a starting price of $249, which is $50 more than the GTX 960 launched for and $50 more than the official MSRP for the RX 480 4GB. That said, most RX 480 cards available now are the 8GB variety, which carries an MSRP of $239, so the two cards are unsurprisingly price-matched. However, as with the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, Nvidia will be producing a Founders' Edition card for a premium, in this instance $50, but all partners cards will be available July 19 as well. The FE card sports premium materials and components, and a die-cast, machine-finished aluminium body.

In terms of specs, we're looking at a new GPU, and the GTX 1060 has the full implementation of it. GP106 is a 4.4 billion transistor GPU built on the 16nm FinFET process with a die size of just 200mm2.

The GPU comprises 10 Streaming Multiprocessors divided evenly into two Graphics Processing Clusters. This nets the GTX 1060 1,280 CUDA cores and 80 texture units, which run at a base clock of 1,506MHz and a boost clock of 1,708MHz. There is 6GB of GDDR5 clocked at an effective speed of 8Gbps, which combined with the 192-bit memory interface nets the card a total memory bandwidth of 192GB/sec, though that's the raw speed and doesn't include any advantages gained by the use of Pascal's fourth generation delta colour compression tool. You also get a 1.5MB slice of L2 cache and 48 ROPs.

The card carries a TDP of just 120W, and thus only needs a single 6-pin PCI-E connector, though board partners are of course free to upgrade this. Display outputs are the usual set for Pascal: a trio of DisplayPort 1.4 headers, a single HDMI 2.0b connector and one dual-link DVI-D plug.

Ultimately, Nvidia says the GTX 1060 will be up to 15 percent faster and up to 75 percent more power efficient than the closest competitor i.e. the RX 480 8GB, although this will vary depending on the exact game, of course. It's also said to be faster than a reference speed GTX 980, or at least on par with it, and consequently Nvidia is touting its new mid-range card as one suitable for both 1080p and 1440p. It is anticipating the launch to be as successful as historic milestones like the 8800 GT and GTX 460.

With support for Pascal's SMP (Simultaneous Multi-Projection), Nvidia is also positioning the GTX 1060 as an entry-level solution for VR. It says there are already 30 games in development which utilise SMP capabilities. One of these is the Nvidia VR Fun House, set to be released in full later this month with support initially only for the HTC Vive HMD and the three GTX 1000-series cards.

Lastly, the GTX 1060 will also support Nvidia Ansel, which is described as Instagram for games. In supported titles it lets you enter a free-roaming camera at any point to capture the exact shot you want i.e. instead of just the usual first or third person screenshot. It has support for numerous filters, 360° panoramic shots, different exposure settings and the ability to render photos in super resolution to beyond 36 megapixels. It's coming to The Witcher 3 and Mirror's Edge Catalyst in July, with plenty more titles also being developed to support it including Unreal Tournament, Tom Clancy's The Division, The Witness and more.

Stay tuned for our full review of the GTX 1060 on July 19.
Discuss this in the forums
YouTube logo
MSI MPG Velox 100R Chassis Review

October 14 2021 | 15:04

TOP STORIES

SUGGESTED FOR YOU