Nvidia seemingly locked up the high-end of the graphics market earlier this year with the launch of the GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 cards. The new Pascal architecture has turned the company’s graphic cards into impressive beasts, but those devices come with a high price tag. At the lower-end of the market AMD’s $200 RX 480 seemed like the card to get, but now Nvidia finally has a contender at this price point as well.
Enter the GeForce GTX 1060 3GB edition, which was just made public. This is a scaled down version of the GTX 1060 with 6GB, the $250 card that Nvidia introduced last month. Unfortunately, as was previously rumored, this scaled-down version features a few other compromises besides the obvious memory downgrade.
As noted on Nvidia’s site, the 3GB version of the GTX 1060 also features fewer CUDA cores than its higher-specced sibling. The same goes for the number of texture mapping units which are reduced from 80 to 72. This downgrade is due to Nvidia using only 9 streaming multiprocessors instead of 10, as found on the 6GB model.
The good news here is that performance should only suffer a small decline, while the rest of the cards specs and features are the same as with the higher-end version. This includes support for VR applications and a 120W TDP rating, for cooler gaming.
The GeForce GTX 1060 with 3GB will retail around the $200 price point, and partners including Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA and other have already announced their own models, which should start hitting markers any day.