When AMD released its RX 480 at the $200 price point, Nvidia must have gulped in surprise and fear. While its GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060 parts destroy AMD's offerings in performance, they were so much more expensive across the board that it seemed unlikely they'd gain much of a following in comparison to AMD's lower cost parts.
However not one to sit idle, Nvidia has now launched a GTX 1060 3GB version, at a much more competitive $200 price point. It does have less memory though, and Nvidia has cut the shader cores to 1152 from 1280 and the texture units to 72 from 80.
This still throws a spanner in AMD's works, because the performance is quite comparable to a 4GB RX 480. The question about whether it will perform as well in DirectX12 scenarios still remains, as AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture has proved to be quite capable in that respect, but Nvidia's card will be no slouch.
The only difficulty may be with that lack of video memory. With just 3GB, it could be that the GTX 1060 struggles with some games that have HD textures. While 4GB with the RX 480 isn't a lot better, that extra 33 percent certainly helps.
It will be interesting to see if AMD responds with a price drop of its own in the near future. Although the RX 480 is already competitive, with Vega incoming, it could dip it down as the new performance king arrives.
What do you think?
