Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB refresh silently released with better memory

Nvidia has debuted a refresh of its mid-range GTX 1060 graphics card with some slight performance enhancements. Perhaps designed to compete directly with AMD’s planned refresh of the RX-580, which is tentatively known as the RX 590, the GTX 1060 upgrade could be a useful stopgap while Nvidia fans await a true successor in a rumored GTX 2060 card.

The GTX 1060 has occupied an important space in the graphics card market for the past two years. With its great 1080P performance and VR compatibility at an affordable price — when cryptomining wasn’t driving it up — it quickly became the most popular graphics card of Nvidia’s Pascal generation and continues to be to this day. However, over time it has fallen behind AMD’s comparable near-$250 competition, the RX 580. Now that an RX 590 might push the performance envelope further while keeping costs down, Nvidia is looking to respond with a refresh of its own.

The GTX 1060 6GB refresh will upgrade the GPU core to a GP104 — the same one found in the GTX 1070. However, it won’t have increased shader or texture units, so it’s not clear what kind of performance impact it will have. What will change though, is the speed of the memory. The new GTX 1060 will utilize GDDR5X memory instead of GDDR5. That should improve its clock speed and overall bandwidth. We’re also told by WCCFTech that the new memory will use 10Gbps chips instead of 9Gbps.

The memory-bus will stay the same, so the overall bandwidth won’t see a huge increase, but may reach 240GBps — just shy of the GTX 1070’s bandwidth and around an 8 percent improvement over the standard GTX 1060.

We’d still expect the RX 590 to be more powerful than such a card, but it will be more competitive when it sees wider availability.