Nvidia may seem to have lost some of the earlier shine of its 1070 and 1080 releases following AMD’s more mainstream offerings of RX 480 ($199/ Rs. 22,000), RX 470 ($139 / Rs. 15,000) and RX 460 ($99 / Rs. 12,000), respectively. The green team is back with the new GTX 1060, though, a new card which starts at $250 (approx. Rs. 27,000), or just $10 more expensive than the 8 GB RX 480.
Of course, the performance boost here is a sizeable one. According to Nvidia, the 16nm FinFET, Pascal-based card is said to be thrice as performance as the GTX 980, a card twice as expensive.
On the spec side of things, you get the new GP106 graphics processor, 1280 CUDA cores, 4.4 billion transistors and a 192-bit memory bus. You also get a boost clock of 1.7 Ghz, and 6 GB GDDR5 memory with an 8 Gbps memory pipe.
The card requires a single 6-pin power supply ring with a TDP of 120W. On the connectivity side, you get three DisplayPort 1.4 and a single HDMI 2.0b. Similar to its competitors, it is also VR-ready.
The 1060, which will only be available in a 6 GB option, will cost $250 on retail. The Founders Edition will retail for a slightly more expensive at $299. The price difference could be covered if you consider the fact that the card is 15 percent faster and 75 percent more efficient than the RX 480, meaning it is the biggest Polaris competitor on the horizon as of now.
Of course, real-world figures could vary and a decision is very difficult to make until we get some benchmarks. That shouldn’t take long as the card is said to go on retail just over a week later.