The Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 has been one of the most successful video cards to date. It has ruled the Steam Hardware Survey charts for three years straight as the most popular GPU among gamers. The card is still at the top, but it is losing market share significantly every month and will slip to the second position by the end of this year. But, it has been six years since the card was introduced. Does it still hold up in modern games and is the performance acceptable? Let us find out.
The GTX 1060 is based on Nvidia’s Pascal architecture like any other GTX 10-series GPU. The card is available in two models. While they are marketed as 3GB and 6GB variants, the latter has some key differences in other specs too.
The 6GB variant packs the GP106 graphics processor with 1,280 CUDA cores, 80 Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), 48 Render Output Units (ROPs), and either 6GB GDDR5 video memory across a 192-bit bus. It was priced at $299 at launch.
In the 3GB variant, we find the same GP106 graphics processor. But, the CUDA core count has been cut down to 1,152 and it packs 72 TMUs in contrast to the 80 found on the 6GB version. The ROP count remains the same at 48. It packs 3GB GDDR5 across the same 192-bit bus. This card was priced at $199 at launch.
While the specs do not look that impressive on paper, both the GTX 1060 3GB and 6GB cards are gaming powerhouses. At today’s most popular resolution, 1920×1080, the GTX 1060 manages to deliver acceptable performance levels in every modern AAA game to date.
Having a look at the competition, the Radeon RX 570 4GB is quite less powerful as compared to the GTX 1060 while being priced at $169. The RX 570 is more of an entry-level budget offering that does not stack up quite well in demanding titles.
Another card that is similarly priced to the GTX 1060 is the Radeon RX 580 8GB. The RX 580 was a great value-for-money offering from the Red Team. It was priced at $229 at launch making it $70 cheaper than the GTX 1060 6GB. But, the card manages to beat the GTX 1060 6GB in almost every title. Considering the current pricing scenario, we thus recommend the RX 580 8GB over the already-aging GTX 1060 6GB. The AMD offering manages to touch 60 FPS in many games at 1080p. The GTX 1060 is failing to attain those numbers lately.