Nvidia announced the third and cheapest card in its Pascal family of GPUs today, the GeForce GTX 1060.
At $249, the GTX 1060 offers 6GB of GDDR5 memory and a boost clock of 1.7GHz, which can be overclocked to 2GHz. That's comparable performance to the GTX 980, which sells for over $400 at most online retailers. Those price and performance points make the new GTX 1060 very attractive for gamers who want to be ready for VR but don't want to fork over the $600 for Nvidia's top-of-the-line Pascal card, the GTX 1080.
Like the rest of the Pascal family, the GTX 1060 sips power: 120 watts is enough to run VR titles and provide satisfying experiences for DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games, Nvidia says. The card's power demands will likely spike if you overclock or crank up the realism settings, of course, but the efficiency compared to other cards is impressive.
The Pascal microarchitecture is also much smaller than previous cards, since it uses 16-nanometer transistors instead of the previous generation's 28-nanometer design.
GTX 1060 custom boards will go on sale July 19 from manufacturers including Asus, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY, and Zotac. A limited-edition Founder's Edition card, manufactured and sold by Nvidia, will also be available July 19 for $299 from Nvidia's website.
The GTX 1060 is compatible with Nvidia's new Ansel capture tool, which allows you to take 360-degree stereo photospheres of your gameplay for viewing with a VR headset. The catch is that game developers must integrate it into their titles; Nvidia announced that Mirror's Edge: Catalyst and Witcher 3 will now have this capability after updates later this month.
In a further sign that Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang intends to make good on his promise that the company is "all-in" when it comes to virtual reality, the GTX 1060 supports Nvidia's VRWorks platform, which in turn is compatible with VR engines from Unreal and Unity. That means millions of game developers have access to VRWorks, and Nvidia said today that more than 30 games and experiences are already in development, including Unreal Tournament, Poolnation VR, Everest VR, Obduction, Adr1ft, and Raw Data.