The embargo has lifted, and the reviews are in. Nvidia’s GTX 1060 is the latest Pascal GPU, and it’s being marketed as the best budget card out there. Nvidia was promising that it would deliver GTX 980 performance for a fraction of the price. That would be a dream come true. The 980 is only a couple of years old, and when it was released it was the king of the hill (with a $500 price tag). Could the 1060 truly offer similar performance, or better performance, at half the cost? The answer seems to be “Yeah, kinda.”
In several benchmarks, the 1060 does indeed perform as well or even slightly better than the 980, but the results have been inconsistent. In truth, this is more of a 960 replacement than anything else, and anyone using 500 or 600 series cards shouldn’t hesitate to consider the 1060 as a fantastic upgrade. Compared to AMD’s RX 480, the GTX 1060 seems to perform a little better with pretty much all DX11 games. Still, as developers start taking advantage of Vulkan and DX12 in the future, those margins will wane. The 1060 didn’t blow anyone away, but it is a solid mid-range option assuming you can find one in stock for $250.