Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB Review

[madmatt30]

Many people underwhelmed because it was hyped just a little too much (like the 480)

Performance has come in just where I expected personally.

My 2 main issues (& I'm not griping it isn't a good card because it plainly is)

1. All the reviews comparing the 1060 & 480 are a factory overclocked 1060 vs a stock clocked reference 480.
2. Price point ( was always going to be an issue)
UK cheapest 1060 - zotac mini £239
UK cheapest RX 480 - xfx 4gb reference - £ 173

That's a massive price difference , disregarding the fact the 1060 has just dropped , realistically I don't see the price going down at all.comparatively the xfx cards rrp is £179.99 , it was that on release, it went up to £199-210 because of demand , its now back down below retail price again.
I've been assured the pricepoint on the aib 8gb 480's is going to be majorly £200-220.

That is a big difference IMO for 10% performance difference in some carefully selected nvidia biased titles.

 

[RedJaron]

I keep seeing sites say that this price range doesn't get a lot of SLI, but I would have thought that's where a lot happens. People that can't afford a 1070/1080, but have $250 now and another $250 in a year or two.

A lot of people try to make this argument, and I always counter with the same point. Consider what the GPU field will be like in two years when you have money for another GPU. You could find an older, possibly used, 1060 to pair with your current one ( assuming SLI could be done, of course ) for $200 - $250 depending on how prices have, or have not, dropped. Or you could spend that same $250 on a card that's a generation, possibly two, newer than the 1060, with all it's improvements. Which would you rather do? What will be the performance difference between the two paths? If your GPU starts showing its age at two years, is it because it doesn't have the brute force necessary, or because it can't efficiently do modern rendering methods? A second card only helps the first problem.

If you're going to SLI or CFX, it should be done at the start, or within six months of the first GPU. And even then it's really only necessary for people pushing a LOT of pixels, like 4K or triple screens. Doubling up cards for 1080 or 1440 just doesn't make sense when you can get the performance you need at those resolutions with a single card. The total cost of SLI/CFX goes beyond the price of just the second card. You need a beefier PSU, a case that can properly deal with the extra heat, and a mboard that supports it ( the last may not be an issue depending on your initial CPU choice ). On top of that you've got scaling issues and potential problems with games not supporting the additional card or not having the SLI/CFX profiles in the drivers yet.

Multi-GPUs are not a panacea or silver bullet. They don't solve all graphics performance problems. It's a specific solution that makes sense in specific situations and tasks. If it was so great, why are the vast majority of gaming PCs on a single GPU? The lack of SLI on the 1060 is a pointless complaint, IMNSHO.

 

[hannibal]

Yep. In general 1060 is better in dx11 and open GL titles.
480 is better in dx12 and Vulcan games. So They Are guite equal.
That is good to customers, because now the price will be important factor.

480 needs custom cooling, 1060 us reasonable even with referensse cooler.
Most interest in seeing custom solutions From both. I would definitely like to see 1060 vs 480 with custom coolers! But most propably the relative situation remains.

 

[none12345]

Rather disappointing. I coulda sworn nvidia said the 1060 would beat the 980, and it doesnt even do it in a single benchmark. At best it almost ties, at worst, it gets close to a 970.... Remember the 970 released at $320 iirc, and the 1060 is releasing at $300, i doesnt do much better then a 970 2 years later, at only a tiny price reduction, i was hoping for more....

Also the founder edition suckers pricing is utterly absurd. But ill ignore that, im really interested in what the non reference 1060s, and non referenced 480s will bring to the table.

The biggest WTF of this article tho.. With all the attention doom is grabbing recently, why are there no doom benchmarks? Especially being the first real vulcan game, you would think it would be here. Same with the other dx12 benchmarks, you said you had them, why didnt you show them. I understand that some of these games are really dx11 and just kinda have dx12 tacked on, which doesnt tell you the whole store, but its still part of the story. DX11 is still relevent but its the past, as long as a card is good enough in dx11 i dont care about if one is faster then another.

What i care about is new games coming out, which are all going to be dx12/vulcan. I feel like you have glossed over a largely relevant discussion by only showing an AOTS benchmark for dx12.

 

[Sakkura]

My 2 main issues (& I'm not griping it isn't a good card because it plainly is)

1. All the reviews comparing the 1060 & 480 are a factory overclocked 1060 vs a stock clocked reference 480.
2. Price point ( was always going to be an issue)
UK cheapest 1060 - zotac mini £239
UK cheapest RX 480 - xfx 4gb reference - £ 173

That's a massive price difference , disregarding the fact the 1060 has just dropped , realistically I don't see the price going down at all.comparatively the xfx cards rrp is £179.99 , it was that on release, it went up to £199-210 because of demand , its now back down below retail price again.
I've been assured the pricepoint on the aib 8gb 480's is going to be majorly £200-220.

That is a big difference IMO for 10% performance difference in some carefully selected nvidia biased titles.

The pricing situation is all over the place though, both because Nvidia's doing this Founder's Edition stuff and because availability of the 4GB RX 480 is poor. Many countries just don't have it at all.

 

[Achoo22]

Geez, I sure wish Intel would jump into the graphics market.

 

[logainofhades]

Sad that my GTX 780ti still doesn't have a viable upgrade, other than a GTX 1070/1080.

 

[madmatt30]

My 2 main issues (& I'm not griping it isn't a good card because it plainly is)

1. All the reviews comparing the 1060 & 480 are a factory overclocked 1060 vs a stock clocked reference 480.
2. Price point ( was always going to be an issue)
UK cheapest 1060 - zotac mini £239
UK cheapest RX 480 - xfx 4gb reference - £ 173

That's a massive price difference , disregarding the fact the 1060 has just dropped , realistically I don't see the price going down at all.comparatively the xfx cards rrp is £179.99 , it was that on release, it went up to £199-210 because of demand , its now back down below retail price again.
I've been assured the pricepoint on the aib 8gb 480's is going to be majorly £200-220.

That is a big difference IMO for 10% performance difference in some carefully selected nvidia biased titles.

The pricing situation is all over the place though, both because Nvidia's doing this Founder's Edition stuff and because availability of the 4GB RX 480 is poor. Many countries just don't have it at all.

The issue in the uk is much much simpler that (sorry to bleat on with UK but its where I live & essentially the only market I really have an interest in)

480 4gb reference - rrp 179.99
480 8gb reference - rrp 219.99

rrp prices in the uk mean a lot lot more than european or panam markets imo,generally thats the most youll pay for a product,of course there were little exceptions with the 480 due to greedy retailing but prices never went to the extortionate end of the scale.

founders edition 1060 6gb - rrp 275
AIB partner cards - 239-269

Big difference & these are 100% The pices we'll be paying in the uk make no mistake.

What nvidia have actually done with both the 1060 & 1070 is giving them a naming convention that suggests theyre in the same market segment as the previous 960 & 970 cards but with a significant performance boost befitting the 2 year wait.
In actuality these cards at the pricepoints they are are a performance tier higher than the previous gen but also a price tier higher too.
the 1060 is a replacement for the 970 both performance & pricewise,not a replacement for the 960,vice versa the 1070 & the 980.

In comparison amd have dropped the 480 4gb in at the exact same pricepoint as the 380 2gb was on release 2 years ago ,& the 8gb 480 at the same pricepoint as the 380 4gb, they did exactly the same with the pricing structure comparing the 380 & the previous 280x
Because of that pricing structure the amd cards are 100% viable replacements for the previous *80 series cards,the nvidia cards are not , irregardless how how good their performance & efficiency is.

 

[Slumy__57]

I don't know why some people are complaining about Nvidia's prices being off for the release of the 1060, they said $300 for FE card, and $250 for partner cards, and that is exactly what is going on so far.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133631&ignorebbr=1

This is one of several 1060's now on Newegg (albeit out of stock) at $250. I'm willing to bet this will rise to some degree over the next few weeks, but they were spot on with their release price, at $10 more than the RX480 8gb.

 

[acasel]

Seems liks toms is cherry the game bench which favors nvidia.. try reading else where and find out that amd 480 blows the 1060 out of the water.

 

[thor220]

Why is project cars used as a benchmark?

 

[ohim]

Everybody does reviews on future cards and yet nobody reviews future API like DX12 or Vulkan .... talking about avoiding the strong part of AMD cards. Youtube is full of videos showing gains from 25 to 100% on Vulkan for AMD and yet everybody avoids Vulkan/DX12 in all these new Nvidia releases.

 

[MasterMace]

Since we know well enough that there's no SLI, can you change the images to indicate it is Explicit Multi Adapter (EMA)?

 

[n0ns3ns3]

Do the math yourself. It is 300$ GTX 1060 Founders and RX 480 250$ (8 GB) , you know. Where does your numbers come from? Apples to apples please. Market prices.....

Why should I? Nvidia said that the FE is for show only. Everyone should get a card from partners starting at 249$.
here is the price http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=06G-P4-6161-KR
I see 249.99$.
Since i got my GTX 1070 within a month from the release for exactly the price mentioned on that site, I see no reason to consider the GTX 1060 as 300$. For 250$ this EVGA card is way better option than reference RX 480 for 240$ (which i also belive will be hard to find at that price).
May be we should compare that EVGA 250 or 260 cards to the Saphire's one ...
ooh ... wait ... there is no custom RX 480 out there ... and not for 240 either ... what a crappy world ...
"RIP AMD" and may their fanboys find peace in green light

 

[littleleo]

1060 gets rekt in DX12. Nvidia biased review again, also project Cars? How is this even a benchmark, obviously gimped for Radeons.

I can't agree with the 1060 suffering in DX12 without seeing the proof, sorry. And I have enough faith in Chris to believe that he would have more integrity than to be dishonest.

You use Project Cars what is known of running so bad on AMD cards, yet there are no dx/vulkan 12 titles except AOTS. We already have Doom(Vulkan), and Total War+Hitman for dx12. This review is weirdly Nvidia biased. People who buy mid lvl cards are not going to change it for at least 2-3 years. And we will see more and more dx12/vulkan titles yet you only include dx11 games with mostly Nvidia support.

I agree with you there. I imagine that Project Cars is an EXTREMELY niche title compared to the new Doom. If one wants to include a racing game, why not one of the Dirt Rally games?

Never gona read tomshardware ever again.

I'll watch out for your next comment. ;-)

Yes indeed. I read elsewhere on DX12 benchmarks GTX 1060 does not cope well against rx480. Also, why not DOOM?

Source please, Myrmidonas? Edit: I found one (over at what I personally consider to be a usually Nvidia biased site, no less!): http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/07/19/nvidia_geforce_gtx_1060_founders_edition_review/4

Kyle, may have some hard feelings toward the head of the AMD marketing group however the guys that do the reviews always seem to be fair to both camps. Usually I feel Anandtech is a little easier on AMD then other sites. Tom's usually tries very hard to offer fair and balanced reviews. I don't know if they always get there but they try.

 

[littleleo]

Everybody does reviews on future cards and yet nobody reviews future API like DX12 or Vulkan .... talking about avoiding the strong part of AMD cards. Youtube is full of videos showing gains from 25 to 100% on Vulkan for AMD and yet everybody avoids Vulkan/DX12 in all these new Nvidia releases.

I think as we see more titles coming out as DX12 we'll see more reviews including it. Still it is a very small minority of what most gamers play.

 

[littleleo]

... Happy with my GTX 970 I bought at $180.

Ditto, though I paid a little more, no reason to upgrade.

 

[littleleo]

Never gona read tomshardware ever again.

Promise?

 

[Jorge Nascimento]

Hello There!

Just wanted to say that in Europe Asus/Gigabyte/msi...etc GTX 1060 6GB is showing prices from 340-390 Euros. Cant imagine the prices of the FE if customs is so expensive
I bought my RX 480 8GB last week for almost 300 Euros, i don't regret the purchase even after seeing the results of the GTX 1060 that are a tiny bit ahead of RX 480. A +300 Euros card is way too much for me, since i replaced a GTX 960 2GB, that costed me 220 Euros.
So in conclusion here in Europe the RX 480 8GB Stock amd cooler €300 vs Customs GTX 1060 6GB that cost 40-90 Euros more. The 2-5% increase in performance that i say today on dozens of review site dont compensate the price difference.
Maybe when AMD partners from Asus, Saphire, gigabyte, msi... release the customs RX 480 with higher Clocks, since custom coolers tend to be more effective then blowers, those 5% difference in performance will disappear.
BTW many 1060 VS RX480 tests i saw today were custom overclocked GTX 1060 from partners vs the "AMD RX 480 at @1266". Only saw 2 reviewers testing the GTX 1060 FE and the difference between them was almost none!

 

[turkey3_scratch]

The hype is gone... I will wait for the partners boards to decide: Green or Red. Let the price war begin...

Price war? Ha! Neither company is doing a price war. Both cards are priced in accordance with their performance. A price war causes both sides to lose. In this case, both AMD and Nvidia are winning, winning, winning.

Some people fail to realize that the entire Pascal GPU lineup has not been as big of an improvement as Maxwell was when it was released. Maxwell significantly reduced power consumption. Pascal has not (it's remained relatively the same to a tad-wee-bit less). The prices are much higher. I'm not talking about the inflated prices, the MSRP and everything are higher than the Maxwell counterparts. I'm not saying Pascal is bad, they are definitely an improvement in performance, and once prices go down they will also be an improvement in price/performance, but with the inflated prices currently Pascal cards are the same price/performance as similarly-priced Maxwell cards. In some cases even worse.

At this current moment in time, the GTX 970 is better value than the GTX 1060. We will be seeing at least $300 for these GTX 1060s, most likely more in the $330 arena since the 1070s are even more expensive. I'm going to stick with my original statement: Founder's Editions are stupid. The coolers just stink. My R9 390, a GPU with nearly 3X the power consumption, stays much cooler than the 1060 FE cooler. Nvidia is so good at marketing their cards that so many people fail to see past what they are doing, which is slowly decreasing the increase in price/performance per generation. Just like how CPUs are becoming limited, I expect GPUs will soon get into that same state. Little improvements.

People talk about new GPUs like Vega and such for 2016 even or early 2017. I say bull. Maxwell was 2014, Pascal was 2016. We can expect Q3 2018 to see the next upgrade after Pascal on the Nvidia side and on the AMD side I'm betting we will have to wait until late 2017 before we see an RX490.

I loved Maxwell. Maxwell was incredible, it really was groundbreaking with how it lowered power consumption so much even without a die shrink and improved performance a ton. But with these new Pascal cards, I'm not seeing that same great jump we saw with Maxwell. Mostly, the poor availability is ruining literally everything. It wasn't this bad with Maxwell. The GTX 1070 and 1080 were supposedly released in May. It is more than half way through July and they still get sold out nearly everywhere immediately and have higher prices. It is indeed getting better, availability is starting to increase, but crap it took so long.

But the GTX 1060 is a good card. I plan to purchase a 1070 when the Gigabyte ITX version comes out, and I am getting nervous that it may be a while and have poor availability. Nonetheless, an improvement is an improvement! Pascal and Polaris are both great.

Edit: I do see cards available currently so it seems this is good!

 

[mitch074]

Can it run Doom or is it so bad you didnt want us to know?

ID said, that they optimzed the render path ONLY for AMD yet and that the Nvidia implemention will follow later. How we can test a hald-done game without the optimized driver?

Currently asynchronous compute is only supported on AMD GPUs and requires DOOM Vulkan supported drivers to run. We are working with NVIDIA to enable asynchronous compute in Vulkan on NVIDIA GPUs. We hope to have an update soon.

Any question? All current tests are useless

No, Id said that they got much better performance out of AMD cards when using Vulkan, because while AMD cards support asynchronous compute natively and actually have hardware units to deal with resources allocations, Nvidia cards just don't support async. This allowed them to get shadow rendering out of the main render pipe and tell the card to deal with it whenever a compute unit was done with its job, while Nvidia cards just can't do that.

 

[redgarl]

Well, AMD shoot themselve in the foot with their TDP issue... but this? At prenium price with no SLI support? There is no way a card like that can be recommended over other alternatives at 1080p or 1440p. Also, the card blow in DX12. My 290x in CF were rendering good FPS in 4k.

 

[redgarl]

Honestly, for 1440p or 1080p, a RX 480 4GB at 200$ is untouchable. Nvidia missed the boat here. AMD is having the mainstream market.

 

[RedJaron]

At prenium price with no SLI support? There is no way a card like that can be recommended over other alternatives at 1080p or 1440p.

Why would you recommend SLI at 1080p or 1440p in the first place? There's no need for two GPUs at those resolutions these days.

 

[idisarmu]

Hey, JACKNAYLORPE: It's not the first time an Nvidia _60 beat an AMD _80. Back in 2008, the GTX 260 (216 shaders) beat the HD 4870 (AMD's top single-gpu card at the time). Granted, the 4870 did beat the 192 shader version of the GTX 260.