Nvidia’s GTX 1060 will get a GDDR5X replace to fend off the AMD RX 590

Nvidia has quietly introduced a brand new graphics card: the GTX 1060 GDDR5X. This new graphics card from the inexperienced workforce has been noticed inside Nvidia’s personal specs sheet for Nvidia’s well-liked GTX 1060, though little else is understood in regards to the card past its sooner reminiscence spec.

Nvidia launched the RTX 20-series playing cards final month, beginning at $499 for the RTX 2070. Nvidia’s Turing graphics playing cards don’t even try to compete within the entry-level or mid-range segments, leaving the most well-liked Pascal card, the GTX 1060, persevering with to rule the roost – it’s additionally the most well-liked graphics card with Steam customers in line with the most recent {hardware} survey. That has left AMD in with an opportunity to capitalise.

AMD has been rumoured to be placing collectively an RX 590 graphics card to seize the amount market. Little is understood in regards to the new GPU, but it surely appears to be much like the RX 580 – albeit with sooner clock speeds than earlier Polaris iterations. That could be why Nvidia has hastily determined to launch a brand new iteration of its hottest graphics card beneath the radar, fearing AMD securing the mid-range market with a brand new launch.

The new graphics card is confirmed by solely a small tweak to the Nvidia website, however one that appears to be intentional not less than. Where as soon as the ‘Frame Buffer’ part of the GTX 1060s specs desk as soon as learn 6 GB GDDR5, it now reads 6 GB GDDR5/X.

That change appears to have been revamped a month in the past, someday across the launch of the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080, however has solely just lately been unearthed by a person on Reddit.

The reminiscence velocity remains to be solely listed at 8Gbps for every variant, though this appears unlikely to be the ultimate spec. Micron lists GDDR5X elements wherever from 10-12 Gbps. Those reminiscence modules are discovered within the GTX 1080 and GTX 1080 Ti playing cards from the Pascal era, and might be a major bump to the reminiscence capabilities of Nvidia’s mid-range graphics card.  Running throughout the identical GTX 1060 reminiscence bus, with the slowest model of GDDR5X obtainable, you’re then 240GB/s of reminiscence bandwidth.

A GTX 1060 with larger reminiscence bandwidth would definitely take the combat to a RX 580 8GB or an RX 590 with a 10% efficiency buff – however all these numbers are nearly totally speculative at this level. The transfer not less than might steal a few of AMD’s thunder no matter how the efficiency shakes out. The inexperienced workforce will seemingly be hoping a light GTX 1060 refresh utilising the now defunct GDDR5X reminiscence will probably be sufficient to reduce the advertising and marketing win all laid out for AMD attributable to its personal lack of latest entry-level / mid-range GPUs.

But the transfer is a little bit of a double-edged sword for players. You could be in luck with Nvidia and AMD now doubtlessly duking it out for the amount section with refreshed playing cards, nonetheless, with Nvidia releasing one other up to date GTX 1060 – there are already varied reminiscence configs for the cardboard – this might imply that the GTX/RTX 2060 and entry-level GPUs primarily based on the Turing structure are nonetheless a great distance from launch.

So far no GTX 1060 GDDR5X playing cards have made it out to market, however rumours counsel preliminary designs are within the labs for launch within the near-future.