While Nvidia has already released the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, AMD figured it was a good time to release their budget minded Radeon RX 480 at the $199 – $249 price range. Releasing just last week, AMD was poised to take a huge stake in many budget minded games or those looking for the best for the buck in the $250 and under price range. However, Nvidia has other plans and has officially announced the GTX 1060. Set to release this July 19th, Nvidia claims that the GTX 1060 will be even more powerful than their last generation GTX 980 (on paper) for a fraction of the price at $250 or $299 for their Founders Edition model.
Based on Pascal, the same architecture that powers the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, the GTX 1060 will feature 6GB of GDDR5 memory, which is important as it was previously rumored that it would only feature 3GB instead. In addition, the card will also feature 1,280 CUDA cores, an HDMI 2.0b, DL-DVI and three Display 1.4 connections, as well as a 6-PIN power connector. Other than that, Nvidia hasn’t been very forthcoming with any more information than that, however, they did claim that the GTX 1060 can easily hit 1.7GHz – 2.0GHz. Which is pretty impressive for what it is.
[table id=11 /]Now, this is where it gets interesting for gamers who are looking for a video card under $250. Do you pick up the AMD RX 480 or do you try your luck on trying to find a GTX 1060 when they are available? Memory aside, the RX 480 gives you a max of 8GB, where the GTX 1060 has 6GB of memory. Which will eventually be best for the gamers will depend on the initial benchmarks that are made available to the public, or leaked.
The other question is, is the July 19 and actual release or is that a paper release, where the cards are nigh impossible to find. We’ll find out, very soon it seems. As for the benchmarks, expect to see the bigger tech reviews to start dropping information the closer to the actual release date.