Nvidia GTX 1060 review: The new best budget graphics card

What a difference a little competition makes. Nvidia was always going to release the GTX 1060, just like it released the GTX 960, GTX 760, and GTX 560 before that. But few could have predicted how soon it would appear after the launch of the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, the company's first Pascal-based graphics cards. Fewer still expected it to be faster than a GTX 980, a card that launched at £430/$550 and still sells for a hefty £320/$400 today.

We've got AMD to thank. Its aggressively priced RX 480—which offers excellent 1080p and VR-ready performance for a mere £180/$200—brought the budget fight to Nvidia in a segment where its competitor has traditionally struggled. If you want the fastest, buy Nvidia; if you want the best value, buy AMD. The GTX 1060 changes that. For the first time in a long time, Nvidia has a mainstream graphics card that can compete on price and performance with AMD.

[Update, July 20: This story has been updated below with information on the launch-day stock situation for the GTX 1060 in both the UK and US.]

[Update, August 23: Nvidia has quietly released a 3GB model of the GTX 1060, priced at about £200. This review is based entirely on the 6GB GTX 1060. Early performance data for the 3GB GTX 1060, which has fewer shader cores, shows performance that's about 5-10 percent below the 6GB model. Against the RX 480—which also has two models: 4GB and 8GB—it's a mixed bag: the 3GB GTX 1060 beats the 8GB RX 480 in some games, but falls behind in others. If you are only looking to play games at 1080p, then the 3GB GTX 1060 will probably be fine; if you want to play at 2560×1440, though, you might want to keep saving up your pennies for the 6GB model.]

[Updated, October 18: Nvidia has just unveiled the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti, priced very aggressively and released on October 25.]

The GTX 1060 is (mostly) faster than the GTX 980; it runs cool and quiet with a light 120W TDP; and best of all the GTX 1060 costs £240/$250. Yes, that's more expensive than the GTX 960's launch price, continuing Nvidia's tradition of jacking up prices this generation. And yes, AMD's RX 480 is a wee bit cheaper. But with around a 15 percent boost in performance on average for a 10 percent jump in price over the comparable 8GB RX 480, it's good value, and it overclocks like a champ with very little effort.

The GTX 970 might have been the people's champion in the last generation, commanding an impressive five percent share of the Steam audience, but I suspect the GTX 1060 will fill that role, particularly for those still on older 600- or 700-series cards. It's a beast at 1080p, VR-ready, and it does a great job with 1440p too. For the average guy or gal who plays on a 1080p monitor and wants to one-up their console gaming friends, this is the graphics card to buy.

But can I actually buy one this time?

That's not to say the GTX 1060 is flawless. Once again, Nvidia is offering two models: the more expensive Founders Edition, which costs £275/$300 and comes comes with a smaller version of the shard-like reference cooler used on the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080, and partner cards, which will come with a range of different coolers and overclocks. Both are said to be available on launch day (July 19, 2016). But if the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 have taught us anything, it's that despite Nvidia's promises of a hard launch, getting hold of its latest and greatest graphics cards is easier said than done.

Even now, stock of the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 is sporadic, and it's pretty much impossible to buy one at the advertised retail price. Nvidia's Founders Edition was launched under a questionable premise (guaranteed availability of reference designs over the full life cycle of the product) and while that's fine for system integrators and Nvidia, the cards have been a disaster for consumers. Nearly all the cards sold by partners have been priced the same as, or more expensively than, the Founders Editions. The early availability of those cards simply served as a fantastic litmus test for partners: if people were willing to pay Nvidia's high prices early on, why charge less afterwards?

Nvidia has crossed its heart, pinky sworn, and given me its word that this won't be the case this time, but I'm going to be keeping a very close eye on GTX 1060 stock. If I can't buy one at the advertised partner price on launch day, expect a strongly worded update to this review.

Update, July 20: As predicted, stock of the GTX 1060 is hard to come by. In the UK, Cards were briefly sold at £239 at Scan, Ebuyer, and Overclockers, but have since sold out. Overclockers is taking pre-orders, or will gladly sell you a Gainward version of the card that's priced at £10 above the MSRP. Scan also has a Palit card in stock at £250.

In the US, NewEgg currently has stock of the Zotac GTX 1060 at the correct MSRP of $249, but orders are limited to one per customer. Be quick if you're interested: all other cards at $249 are sold out, with even the more expensive partner cards like the $329 Asus Strix on back order. Best Buy also had cards from PNY and EVGA at $249, but has also sold out. Some retail Best Buy stores may have stock on shelves if you're lucky.

Meanwhile, availability of AMD's RX 480 is mixed. There's plenty of stock of the 8GB version of the card in the UK, and now at just £5 over the MSRP. That said, the cheaper 4GB card has all but disappeared from online stores, although Overclockers will sell you one for a hugely inflated £215—just £5 less than the 8GB version. In the US, neither Best Buy or NewEgg currently has stock of either version of the RX 480.

Despite prices currently at £10 above the MSRP, the GTX 1060 launch is better than that of the GTX 1070 and GTX 1080. Both of those cards are still selling for inflated prices online. Given that the cheaper 4GB version of the RX 480 still isn't an option at the moment, the conclusion still stands: the GTX 1060 is the card I'd recommend to most gamers looking for the best graphics performance without spending a fortune.

And now back to the original story...

It's also worth noting that by comparison, the RX 480 has a had a far smoother retail rollout. Sure, AMD had a PR problem with the card's power draw—something that's been somewhat resolved by a recent driver update—but availability of the RX 480 has mostly been good. Right now it's possible to buy an 8GB model at just £5 above the MSRP.

If you do decide to plump for the pricier Founders Edition, you get a multifaceted shroud made out of aluminium, as you do with the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, although it's slightly shorter at 240mm, and has an opaque black plastic section on top instead of a clear window. Inside are two copper heat pipes along with a dual-FET power-delivery system and custom voltage regulators. There's 6GB of 8GHz GDDR5 memory, along with a 1,506MHz GPU base clock and a 1,708MHz boost clock, just above that of the GTX 1070. Nvidia says the GTX 1060 will easily overclock to 2GHz, and my tests confirm that. There's plenty of headroom here for those who like to tweak.

Power is handled by a single six-pin PCIe power connector, with the card sporting a 120W TDP (the GTX 980 had a 165W TDP), continuing the impressive efficiency improvements of TSMC's 16nm FinFET manufacturing process. Connectivity is handled by three DisplayPort 1.4 ports, one HDMI 2.0b port with support for 4K60 10/12b HEVC decode, and one dual-link DVI port.

At the heart of the GTX 1060 is a new Pascal chip, dubbed GP106. Essentially, the 200mm² GP106 die is a chopped-in-half version of the GP104 (as used in the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070), leaving five Streaming Multiprocessors (SM) made up of 1,280 CUDA Cores and 80 Texture Units. Those are bound to 48 ROPs and 1,536KB of L2 cache, while the 192-bit memory system results in 192GB/s of memory bandwidth. All are huge improvements over the GTX 960. Of note is the fact that the GTX 1060 uses the full implementation of GP106, leaving room for Nvidia to use a binned version of the chip for cheaper cards.

GPU Boost 3.0, Fast Sync, HDR, VR Works Audio, Ansel, and preemption (an alternative approach to asynchronous compute) make a return too (check out our GTX 1080 review for more details), as well as the ability to render multiple viewpoints in a single render-pass. The latter is especially useful for VR where, instead of rendering one eye and then rendering another, the GTX 1060 can render both viewpoints at once, drastically speeding up VR performance. Not many games have implemented the feature just yet, but Nvidia says that it's coming to major engines like Unreal and Unity soon.

What's missing from the GTX 1060 is support for SLI. Nvidia has been slowly dialling back support for multiple graphics cards that use Pascal, starting with only allowing two-way SLI in games (up to four work in synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark), and then simply removing it entirely in the GTX 1060. This is completely at odds with AMD, which actively pitched using Crossfire when it launched the RX 480. It's a shame Nvidia has removed SLI support, but given that scaling and support varies drastically from game to game, going with a single card has always been the better option, particularly at this mainstream price point.

Performance (and why you should overclock)

The GTX 1060 was tested with a suite of games on the Ars Technica UK standard test rig, including three games that use DirectX 12. There's still no reliable way to capture frame data for DX12 games without a dedicated hardware setup just yet, but for everything else there's a 99th percentile score, which shows the minimum frame rate you can expect to see 99 percent of the time. This is a great way to highlight the comparative smoothness of games—the higher the gap between the average of the 99th percentile, the more jittery a game feels.

Each game was tested at 1080p, 1440p, and UHD (4K) resolutions at high or ultra settings at stock speeds. I also overclocked the GTX 1060 to put Nvidia's 2GHz claims to the test, and I'm pleased to say that it passed and then some. With zero voltage or fan tweaks I was able to overclock the GTX 1060 to 2,025MHz on the GPU, and a hugely impressive 9,050MHz on the memory. Those that are willing to crank the fan speed or tweak the voltage are likely to get even more, while partner cards that add extra power delivery and better cooling will help things along.

On the synthetics and science side there's the standard 3DMark Firestrike benchmark (again, run across three resolutions), as well as LuxMark 3.0, CompuBench, and FAHBench (the official Folding@Home benchmark) to test compute performance.

The GTX 1060 is indeed faster than a GTX 980, but by how much? On Rise of the Tomb Raider (DX11, 1080p) it's a small, but not insubstantial, six percent. In most other games, however, the GTX 1060 just scrapes past the GTX 980 by one or two frames per second, or is just behind by the same amount. Interestingly, it fares better at 1440p, with a lead of seven percent on Metro Last Light and 14 percent on Hitman. The GTX 980's greater number of CUDA cores helps it regain the lead at 4K, but neither card is really suitable for gaming at that resolution unless you're willing to make some big sacrifices to visual fidelity.

As mentioned, the GTX 1060 overclocks well; if you've got a half-hour to spare, there are plenty of free performance gains to be hand. I saw around an eight percent boost across the board with my overclock, which was great for that 1440p games that didn't quite reach a locked 60FPS at stock speeds. That eight percent boost also means the GTX 1060 totally surpasses the GTX 980, although it's worth noting that the GTX 980 was a good card for overclocking too. Against the much older GTX 780 Ti, the GTX 1060 comes out on top too, with significant gains across most games.

Compared to the card it replaces, the GTX 960, the difference is remarkable: the GTX 1060 is around 50 percent faster. Normally, I'd recommend upgrading a graphics card every other year, but this time the difference in performance is so big (the 6GB of memory is a substantial upgrade too) that it might be worth looking into the GTX 1060 if you're struggling to run some of your favourite games. Those on anything older than a 780 Ti will see a big performance boost too.

As for how the GTX 1060 compares to its closest competitor, AMD's RX 480, it's no contest. With the exception of Hitman and Ashes of the Singularity, which tend to favour AMD cards, the GTX 1060 is significantly faster. On average, it's around 15 percent faster, rising as high as 19 percent in Bioshock Infinite. The RX 480 remains an excellent mainstream graphics card for 1080p gaming, but if you can stretch the budget just a wee bit, the GTX 1060 is more than worth the extra cash.