Nvidia GTX 1060 May Bring GTX 980 Performance to the Masses

Reportedly set to be revealed later this week on July 7th, the GTX 1060 GPU from Nvidia has been the subject of many rumours. According to various rumours, the new GP106 based GPU is set to use a 192bit memory bus and fit under the GTX 1070. With just a few days to go until the Nvidia event, launch slides have now been leaked for all to see.

According to the leaked slides, the GTX 1060 features 1280 CUDA cores along with a 192bit memory bus with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM. This fits in exactly where we would expect the GTX 1060 to be, utilising the new GP106 die. It’s unlikely that its the GP104 die since that would require throwing away half of the full die. If it does end up being the GP104, it would mean yields are terrible which is unlikely.

Other specifications were also leaked as well, with a 1.7 GHz boost clock giving approximately 4.4 TFLOPs of performance. This is leading to claims of GTX 980 levels of performance which is about right. I see the GTX 1060 falling between the GTX 980 and RX 480 based on what we’ve seen of Maxwell/Pascal and Polaris. Nvidia is claiming 15% better performance than the RX 480 and a 25% lead in VR. Honestly, I expect the gap will be a bit closer, especially in VR. The graph looks bad for AMD but the values do start at 0.8. The GTX 1060 will have a decent efficiency lead as its only coming in at 120W TDP.

With only a few days to go, I expect we’ll have more leaks and information about the new Pascal card shortly. Hopefully, we’ll have a real launch sooner rather than later unlike the paper launch we saw with the GTX 1080/1070. Given that the release date is only given as July, I think we’re getting more a paper launch for now as a way to counter the RX 480.