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The 3GB version of Nvidia's GTX 1060 is a curious product. Is it actually a GTX 1060 at all? The cutbacks made to this product aren't just memory-based in nature. In addition to chopping down the full-fat product's memory allocation, we also see a drop in available processing cores. The full complement of 1280 shaders drops to 1152 - and most of the time, this tends to be accompanied by a change in name. GTX 1050 Ti, any one? GTX 1060 LE?It seems that Nvidia is using its product names now to group its GPUs together in terms of performance as opposed to actual spec. Based on the firm's claims, the three gig GTX 1060 should offer just a five per cent deficit in performance compared to the same product running the fully enabled GP106 processor. Essentially - in practise, you probably won't be able to tell the difference.
But it's the drop in available memory we should be most concerned about. High quality texture modes are on the increase, downloadable 'HQ' texture packs are also a thing, not to mention the beginnings of memory hungry hyper-level presets - as seen in Mirror's Edge Catalyst. Now, generally speaking, based on our experience playing the likes of Gears of War Ultimate Edition, Mirror's Edge, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Doom 2016, the difference can be quite subtle. But the point is that generally speaking, memory requirements are only moving in one direction and there's a definite sense that even with its cut-back shader allocation, GTX 1060 3GB doesn't fully balance its performance with its framebuffer resources.
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