NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060 news: Most affordable of Pascal-based graphic card lineup? Touted to beat AMD's Radeon RX 480?

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060, the latest addition to the GeForce 10 family, has just been unveiled by NVIDIA, which is deemed to offer good performance at a very competitive price. It will be formally released on July 19.

Reports say that the GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card will feature the 16 nm FinFET-based Pascal architecture, which is aimed to deliver a big boost in performance and efficiency. It is touted to best its predecessors in those two aspects.

With a starting price of $249 USD, it is considered the most affordable among Pascal-based graphic cards. According to NVIDIA, the GeForce GTX 1060's thermal design power (TDP) is only 120 W and it promises to be much faster than GTX 980, which costs $400 USD. The GTX 980 is said to be the direct competitor of AMD's Radeon RX 480, but with the entry of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060, it looks like the former has found another tough competition in price and specifications.

NVIDIA has earlier announced that the GeForce GTX 1060 will be based on a new GP106 chip and not on a binned version of the previous GP104 chip, which is found in the previous iterations – the GTX 1070 and 1080. The graphic card will feature 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8GHz, 1280 CUDA cores, and a boost clock of 1.7GHz, according to Engadget. Incidentally, the boost clock may be easily overclocked to over 2GHz.

Perhaps the only downside to NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1060 is that only a 6GB memory version of the card would be available. Even so, it would be made available from other manufacturers such as Gigabyte, Zotac, and Asus.

Meanwhile, a Founder's Edition of the GTX 1060 would likewise be released, and it would cost $299 USD. It seems the higher price tag is due to the dual-FET power supply and blower-style cooling system similar to what is found in the GTX 1070 and 1080.

ArsTechnica has confirmed that both the Founder's Edition and other partner cards will be launched on July 19. Until then, it remains to be seen whether the rumors that the graphics card won't favor virtual reality and 4K gaming due to memory issues are true or not.