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Just a couple of weeks after the launch of AMD's mainstream-friendly Radeon RX 480, Nvidia enters the fray with its own pitch to the more value-orientated gamer. The new GeForce GTX 1060 is pricier than both of the Radeon RX 480 SKUs - and it loses two gigs of VRAM compared to AMD's 8GB offering. However, Nvidia hopes that the extra power on offer makes the difference, promising GTX 980-level performance. Two years ago, that would have set you back £430/$550. Today, thanks to GTX 1060, it's £240/$250. That's a highly attractive proposition but the question is, does the product fully deliver?Based on the new GP106 chip using the latest cutting-edge Pascal architecture, Nvidia's cut-down processor has much in common with its last-gen equivalent, GM206. The firm has taken the current top-tier example of its gaming technology and cut the CUDA core allocation in half, yielding 1280 shaders. It was a recipe that made for a 'good but not great' product in the form of GTX 960, but Nvidia has taken steps to improve performance this time around, and as the benchmarks across this page demonstrate, there's a game-changing leap in performance here.
There's no anemic 128-bit memory bus this time around - instead, Nvidia has kitted out GTX 1060 with a 192-bit interface, backed by 8gbps GDDR5 memory modules, giving us a total of 192GB/s of bandwidth. That's a big boost compared to GTX 960, but some way short of the 256GB/s you get with the Radeon RX 480 in its 8GB guise. The memory set-up effectively limits GTX 1060 to either 3GB or 6GB of VRAM - but thankfully Nvidia has shelved any plans for the former, meaning that all GTX 1060s ship with six gigs. This gives us a good balance of rendering power and framebuffer memory, and a good degree of future-proofing for 1080p and 1440p gaming.
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