Gtx 1060

[Vash The Stampede]

Great explanation, my moron idiot self understood it all.

So basically you're recommending a RX 470 with.. 8GB? 4?

My recommendation is if you can find it for the right price, then buy it. Cause right now AMD cards are hard to find. At the same time the GTX 1060 is a good card for $250, but only for $250. I wouldn't pay anymore than that for a 1060. At the same time I don't believe in needing anymore than 4GB for the RX 480 or 470. You will rarely reach beyond 4GB with these graphic cards, though there are some games that make good use of the 8GB of VRAM.

Personally the sweat spot is RX 470 4GB, but that's my opinion. Because of the less Compute Cores, the RX 470 can be overclocked easily. For $150, if you can find it for that price, it gives the RX 480 and 6GB 1060 a run for their money.

I haven't seen benchmarks of the 3GB 1060, but at face value I would avoid it. $200 for a 3GB card is just wrong.

[Thunderball]

Triple because 3GB vs 8GB. The rest of your post is mumbo jumbo to me, didn't I mention I'm a moron idiot?
Please explain to me like I'm 5 years old - if I want to upgrade my GPU, how important is the memory?

Depending on how high settings you want to play at you need more memory. If you're looking into GTX 1060 dont even look towards 3GB version. Imo your options are basically GTX 1060 6GB vs RX 470 8GB, depending on your budget and availability of those.

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My recommendation is if you can find it for the right price, then buy it. Cause right now AMD cards are hard to find. At the same time the GTX 1060 is a good card for $250, but only for $250. I wouldn't pay anymore than that for a 1060. At the same time I don't believe in needing anymore than 4GB for the RX 480 or 470. You will rarely reach beyond 4GB with these graphic cards, though there are some games that make good use of the 8GB of VRAM.

Personally the sweat spot is RX 470 4GB, but that's my opinion. Because of the less Compute Cores, the RX 470 can be overclocked easily. For $150, if you can find it for that price, it gives the RX 480 and 6GB 1060 a run for their money.

I haven't seen benchmarks of the 3GB 1060, but at face value I would avoid it. $200 for a 3GB card is just wrong.

RX 480 and RX 470's thing is DX12. Those games are heavy, 4GB is not enough for them. In older games new AMD cards are worthless.

[Meagree]

RX 480 and RX 470's thing is DX12. Those games are heavy, 4GB is not enough for them. In older games new AMD cards are worthless.

By "worthless" do you mean actually bad, or just not worth the extra money over, say, a GTX 960?

[Thunderball]

By "worthless" do you mean actually bad, or just not worth the extra money over, say, a GTX 960?

GTX 960 is not worth any money. It was bad even when it was current generation. Worthless means compared to GTX 1060.

[Lathais]

RX 480 and RX 470's thing is DX12. Those games are heavy, 4GB is not enough for them. In older games new AMD cards are worthless.

Define older game please. Since you mention DX12, I assume you mean fairly current games that use DX11 because any game older than that, the new cards have more than enough horsepower to handle. Even at that though:

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/...TRIX_OC/9.html

Both the 470 and the 480 seem to do just fine. What other sub $200 choice is going to better than that in "older" games?

[Meagree]

GTX 960 is not worth any money. It was bad even when it was current generation. Worthless means compared to GTX 1060.

That's what I meant, thanks for clarifying.

[Thunderball]

Define older game please. Since you mention DX12, I assume you mean fairly current games that use DX11 because any game older than that, the new cards have more than enough horsepower to handle. Even at that though:

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/...TRIX_OC/9.html

Both the 470 and the 480 seem to do just fine. What other sub $200 choice is going to better than that in "older" games?

The only sub-$200 out of those is RX 470 4GB. My advice would be waiting when you have 250 =)

[Bigvizz]

I'd never buy a card with only 3gb today.
Even 6gb on the 1060 is not really much, but at least adequate.

Currently I'm playing Rise of the Tomb Raider again. A lot of the time the 6gb VRAM is completely full.

Rise of the Tomb Raider treats Vram a bit differently than other games. So that's not a good game to compare with others using the argument that 6 gigs is barely enough. Hell on my 1070 RotR is using 7.5 gigs, the game is precaching all available memory for later use. Short of having a Titan X, all of your memory will be used for that game. 6 gigs is plenty and will be for the foreseeable future, there aren't any games out that I'm aware of that use that much memory. Correct me if I'm wrong on this.

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Great explanation, my moron idiot self understood it all.

So basically you're recommending a RX 470 with.. 8GB? 4?

The 470 is a great buy it's barely behind the 480 in most titles....if you can get for 189$, but stock is a problem.

[Vash The Stampede]

RX 480 and RX 470's thing is DX12. Those games are heavy, 4GB is not enough for them. In older games new AMD cards are worthless.

Other than Doom Vulkan, there aren't many games that need more than 4GB. And Vulkan Doom is always set to crazy settings. But like I said, there are some situations where 8GB is needed.

[Deleted]

Hey I just bought a brand new PC with an i5 6500 16GB Ram and a Palit GTX1060 DUAL 6GB. For some weird reason I'm dropping to 28 fps in warspear/OG and around 40 in the garrison. The screen resolution is 1920x1080. My drivers are up to date it it is really bugging me. Anyone else having a similar problem?

[Fascinate]

Hey I just bought a brand new PC with an i5 6500 16GB Ram and a Palit GTX1060 DUAL 6GB. For some weird reason I'm dropping to 28 fps in warspear/OG and around 40 in the garrison. The screen resolution is 1920x1080. My drivers are up to date it it is really bugging me. Anyone else having a similar problem?

What settings are you at in game? The 10 and 9 presets shouldnt exist imo, horrible optimization for barely any changes to graphic fidelity.

[Zenny]

VRAM is fast, like super fast. So long as the graphics is using this memory, things should be fine. The problem begins when the data is larger than the VRAM on the card, and spills over to your system memory. You know the DDR3 or DDR4 memory you installed in your motherboard. When that happens, the performance drops massively.

The issue with the 3GB 1060 is that it's about the speed of a 970 but has 1GB or .5GB less VRAM then a 970. This card won't work optimally. The RX 470 has 4GB of VRAM, and also performs like a 970, but won't be bottlenecked by its VRAM. There's a very good reason why Nvidia released the 3GB 1060 so quietly, because they know the benchmark resutls for it would be bad.

This card exists purely to fuck with consumers. You go to the store and buy a 3Gb 1060, thinking it's the same thing as a 6GB 1060, but it's not. It's a cut down 1060, with less CUDA cores as well as less VRAM. When Nvidia cuts down CUDA cores, the 1080 became the 1070. When AMD cuts down on Compute cores, the RX 480 became the RX 470. Here, the 1060 is still a 1060, except it's not. It should have been called the 1050, but because Nviida likes money they were hoping nobody would notice. Also because the RX 470 is $50 cheaper, and has 1GB more VRAM, plus is hardly slower than the RX 480.

This is the Geforce 4 MX all over again.

The 1060 3GB has a MSRP of $199 vs the $189 of the 4GB RX470. Although most RX470's retail for around $199 as well, some actually a bit more. You can get RX470's with 8GB of VRAM but that would be silly as you can pick up a 1060 6GB or RX480 8GB for 10$ more.

Considering Nvidia's much superior memory compression technology (seriously the memory compression in Pascal is amazing) I'd imagine a 1060 3GB vs a 470 4GB would be very close indeed. I personally expect a repeat of the 1060 6GB vs RX 480.

Frankly the best card for $250 remains the EVGA 1060 ACX 2.0 for $249. It's small, runs quiet and cool, and can overclock to around 2.1Ghz.

[Deleted]

What settings are you at in game? The 10 and 9 presets shouldnt exist imo, horrible optimization for barely any changes to graphic fidelity.

I did just set everything on 10. I'd imagine that with a card that looks like such an overkill it wouldn't be a problem. I guess optimisation is still lacking for newer cards or even in general. Hopefully they will improve it with future updates.

[Vash The Stampede]

The 1060 3GB has a MSRP of $199 vs the $189 of the 4GB RX470. Although most RX470's retail for around $199 as well, some actually a bit more. You can get RX470's with 8GB of VRAM but that would be silly as you can pick up a 1060 6GB or RX480 8GB for 10$ more.

The RX 470 has a MSRP of $150, though like you said it's realistically $189. The 3GB 1060 will likely have the same price hike as every other graphics card. I'm surprised there's no Founders Edition for this.

Considering Nvidia's much superior memory compression technology (seriously the memory compression in Pascal is amazing) I'd imagine a 1060 3GB vs a 470 4GB would be very close indeed. I personally expect a repeat of the 1060 6GB vs RX 480.

Memory compression is superior on Nvidia, but the 3GB isn't the only thing that's limiting this card. The card is also missing CUDA cores, which is concerning. With AMD the difference between the 4GB and 8GB is $40, but no Compute cores are missing. You are paying $50 less for half the VRAM, but for less cores are well. I predict the 1060 to be slower than the RX 470.

Frankly the best card for $250 remains the EVGA 1060 ACX 2.0 for $249. It's small, runs quiet and cool, and can overclock to around 2.1Ghz.

I agree, if you can find the card for $250. Any 6GB 1060 is worth $250, but only if you can find it for that price. Depending on the country you live, the prices may favor AMD or Nvidia. AMD really needs to correct their prices abroad.

[Zenny]

The RX 470 has a MSRP of $150, though like you said it's realistically $189. The 3GB 1060 will likely have the same price hike as every other graphics card. I'm surprised there's no Founders Edition for this.

Er, no. The MSRP is $189. The card was rumored to be $150 but that never happened. Although only 1 or 2 models actually go at $189, the majority (90%+) are all at $199 or higher.

Memory compression is superior on Nvidia, but the 3GB isn't the only thing that's limiting this card. The card is also missing CUDA cores, which is concerning. With AMD the difference between the 4GB and 8GB is $40, but no Compute cores are missing. You are paying $50 less for half the VRAM, but for less cores are well. I predict the 1060 to be slower than the RX 470.

The 3GB 1060 is meant to compete with the RX 470, not the non-existent 4GB RX 480, the card is only $10 more then the 4GB RX470, the exact same price gap as between the RX 480 and Geforce 1060 6GB. Also I highly doubt the 1060 3GB would be slower then the RX 470, both cards are missing about 10% of the SM units of their larger brothers, the main difference being the RX 470 is clocked a bit lower while the 1060 3GB is clocked a bit higher.

Sure the 4GB RX 480 for $199 is great if you can actually find it, and considering the RX470 prices I wouldn't hold my breath on that one.

I agree, if you can find the card for $250. Any 6GB 1060 is worth $250, but only if you can find it for that price. Depending on the country you live, the prices may favor AMD or Nvidia. AMD really needs to correct their prices abroad.

Stock is a problem for all the cards at a moment, although if you use http://www.nowinstock.net/ you can usually find whatever you are looking for as soon as stock comes in, before everything is snatched up. I just saw the 1060 3GB in stock for $199 at newegg.

[Ragedaug]

Stock is a problem for all the cards at a moment, although if you use http://www.nowinstock.net/ you can usually find whatever you are looking for as soon as stock comes in, before everything is snatched up. I just saw the 1060 3GB in stock for $199 at newegg.

I had been scanning Amazon and Newegg every day since the end of last month. Finally got lucky a few days ago (Tuesday afternoon) and Amazon had some stock in of the EVGA 1060 SC Gaming (6163). Got it for the $259 list price. It was only online for a couple hours before they were sold out again and only the 3rd party scalpers remained.

*Just went to your link. That's very interesting. I see Amazon posted some on the 15th as well. I figure either way I got lucky and just happened to check in at Amazon during the small window where they had stock before they sold out.

[Zenny]

I had been scanning Amazon and Newegg every day since the end of last month. Finally got lucky a few days ago (Tuesday afternoon) and Amazon had some stock in of the EVGA 1060 SC Gaming (6163). Got it for the $259 list price. It was only online for a couple hours before they were sold out again and only the 3rd party scalpers remained.

Yep, stock is coming in all the time, but you have to be active with monitoring to get cards before they get snatched up. Luckily I knew somebody who got me my 1080 FE for cheaper then the listed price on launch day. Otherwise I could have been in the same boat.

[Remilia]

It's not VRAM compression, it's color compression, very specific. It doesn't mean that you have a higher effective VRAM capacity, it means you have a higher effective memory bandwidth where applicable. The game still fills VRAM with whatever the game feels like, that content doesn't change. Compression happens at the ROPs level, not in VRAM.

tl;dr 3GB of VRAM is 3GB despite color compression.

[Tomservo]

I had been scanning Amazon and Newegg every day since the end of last month. Finally got lucky a few days ago (Tuesday afternoon) and Amazon had some stock in of the EVGA 1060 SC Gaming (6163). Got it for the $259 list price. It was only online for a couple hours before they were sold out again and only the 3rd party scalpers remained.

*Just went to your link. That's very interesting. I see Amazon posted some on the 15th as well. I figure either way I got lucky and just happened to check in at Amazon during the small window where they had stock before they sold out.

I got mine Tuesday on Amazon as well! High five! Also, I am beyond thrilled with it.

[darklogrus]

I got mine Tuesday on Amazon as well! High five! Also, I am beyond thrilled with it.

Got a GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 Windforce OC 6Gb on Thursday, I been surprised how out of stock both the 1060 and Rx 480's have been. Though Im not sure what to think, sooooo many 1060 3Gb models are in stock....