NVIDIA has added the GeForce GTX 1060 to its family of Pascal gaming GPUs, joining the previously released GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 graphical powerhouses.
The GTX 1060 delivers GTX 980-level performance whilst consuming only 120 watts of power. The new card can easily drive all the latest VR and DirectX 11/12 PC games.
The GTX 1060 features 1,280 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8Gbps and a boost clock of 1.7GHz, which can be easily overclocked to 2GHz for further performance. According to NVIDIA, gamers will find the GTX 1060, on average across the top gaming titles, 15 percent faster and over 75 percent more power efficient than the closest competitive product at stock speeds.
GTX 1060 custom boards will be available starting July 19 from NVIDIA GeForce partners, including ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY and Zotac. NVIDIA GeForce partners represent a global network that will deliver GTX 1060 to gamers in 238 countries and territories.
The GTX 1060 supports NVIDIA VRWorks, a software developer kit that allows developers to intertwine what users see, hear and touch with the physical behaviour of the environment-convincing them that their virtual experience is real.
Included with VRWorks is NVIDIA Simultaneous Multi-Projection technology, which allows the GTX 1060 to seamlessly project a single image simultaneously to both eyes, yielding a 3x VR graphics performance improvement over previous generation GPUs. This allows GTX 1060 users to play VR games with higher levels of detail, without sacrificing performance or quality, for a more realistic, immersive experience.
Simultaneous Multi-Projection is being integrated into the world's biggest game engines, Unreal Engine and Unity. More than 30 games are already in development, including Unreal Tournament, Poolnation VR, Everest VR, Obduction, Adr1ft and Raw Data.
The GTX 1060 also supports NVIDIA Ansel™ technology, a powerful game-capture tool that allows gamers to explore, capture and share the artistry of gaming in ways never before possible. With Ansel, users can compose the gameplay shots they want, pointing the camera in any direction, from any vantage point within a gaming world, and then capture 360-degree stereo photospheres for viewing with a VR headset or Google Cardboard.
Gamers will be able to experience Ansel for themselves with Mirror's Edge: Catalyst next week, and Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, later this month. Many more Ansel-enabled games are in development including Epic Games' Fortnite, Paragon and Unreal Tournament, Cyan Worlds' Obduction, Thekla's The Witness, Boss Key Productions' Lawbreakers, Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's The Division, and the highly anticipated No Man's Sky from Hello Games.
NVIDIA VR Funhouse, the company's VR carnival game, will be available for free later this month from Valve's Steam digital distribution service. Developed on Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4, VR Funhouse will work on GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060 GPUs and HTC Vive VR headsets. It will also be open sourced to developers and artists so they can create their own VR Funhouse attractions.
The GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition board – designed and built by NVIDIA – will be available starting July 19 at www.nvidia.com only. The GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition is crafted with premium materials and components, including a faceted die-cast aluminium body machine finished for strength and rigidity and a thermal solution designed to run cool and quiet.
Like the GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 Founders Edition boards, a dual-FETs power supply is used to improve power efficiency, along with a low impedance power delivery network and custom voltage regulators.
Look out for a detailed review of the GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition soon.