The release of the RX 480 by AMD definitely stirred the pots over on Team Green, as NVIDIA scrambled to announce the GTX 1060 a little over a week after 480 hit the shelves. It does not come as any surprise that the announcement and subsequent launch of the 1060 has been rushed, however, has that affected the quality of the product? Short answer: Not at all.
With the GTX 1060, NVIDIA gets a lot of things right. They seem have gone back to the drawing board and fixed more or less every criticism levelled at them regarding the 960. The new 1060 boasts of a much improved 192 bit memory interface and an impressive 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM. All this at a maximum TDP of just 120 watts is quite an achievement. Moreover, the card, owing to its low TDP runs quite cool, with the temperature peaking at 700C at full load, much cooler than other cards like the 1070, 1080 and even RX 480.
The one drawback with the 1060 however, is that it doesn’t support SLI. While very few gamers actually go for SLI as per Steam statistics, having the option completely removed has rubbed many a people the wrong way, though if you want to SLI a 1060 you might as well buy a single 1070 card.
The most important aspect of a new GPU is how well it handles games, and the GTX 1060 completely bossed all the games that I benched it on. Moreover, and perhaps the most important part is that the 1060 bossed the RX 480 across the board even on games running on DirectX12. In games like the Witcher 3, Doom, The Division and Rise of The Tomb Taider the 1060 averaged a frame rate of 55, 94, 70 and 38 respectively at full HD and 44, 69, 51 and 22 respectively at 1440p.
The most surprising result of all the benchmarks was that the 1060 actually managed to beat the 980 in certain cases at 1440p, a feat that NVIDIA ought to be really proud of.
Why is it important that the 1060 matched the 980 in performance? Well for starters, at Rs 22,999 this seems to be the most economical option for gamers looking to boost their rig’s performance. By setting such an aggressive price point, undercutting AMD’s RX 480 by almost Rs 4,000, NVIDIA is ensuring that it maintains its dominance over the mid-range GPU market, just as it did with the GTX 960 the previous generation. Though, not all cards will be available at Rs 22,999 with expected prices to be around the Rs 25,000 mark.
All in all, the GTX 1060 is a great card that offers the best price to performance ratio seen in the Indian market since the launch of the GTX 750ti way back in the day. So If you are in the market for a new graphics card and are confused about which medium range card to buy, the GTX 1060 is probably the best value for money you are going to get.
