AMD might be in trouble as the leaked benchmarks of the NVIDIA GTX 1060 show that it beats the Radeon RX 480 by roughly 15 percent and with almost the same expected retail price.
Several weeks earlier, the GTX 1060 was nothing but a rumor sparked to life because someone spotted the GP106 GPU in a shipment manifest. There were no details at the time as nobody was leaking information or specs and everybody else was busy waiting for the RX 480 or searching for available stocks of the GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080.
Now, more specs, benchmarks and photos are quickly surfacing about the GTX 1060. They started spreading like crazy and it started with a leaked photo a day before the Polaris 10 card was going to be launched by AMD.
Initial specs of the new Pascal card were shown thanks to slides that were supposedly from NVIDIA themselves. It showed that the performance is roughly that of their now $300 GTX 980 which was the top card to beat last year along with the GTX 980 Ti and the GTX Titan.
The GTX 1060 3DMark FireStrike results were posted first by XFastest and it shows that it scored 3014 on the Ultra preset, Forbes has learned. Recent benchmarks of the AMD Radeon RX 480 show that it scores only about 2600 on 3DMark FireStrike Ultra.
NVIDIA's new Pascal card is put on par with the GTX 980 which scores almost the same on the synthetic benchmark from 3DMark. The expected price of the GTX 1060 6GB model is around $250 which is more expensive than the RX 480 8GB models $229 but the performance and extra features will be worth the bucks.
One caveat for interested GTX 1060 users is that SLI support seems to be non-existent at the moment and NVIDIA does not have any plans of making it possible, Firstpost reported. The CrossFire setup of the Polaris card was indeed shown to beat the GTX 1080 at some tests but not all which makes it a moot point either way.
NVIDIA is expected to launch the GTX 1060 this July and it could certainly be an AMD Radeon RX 480 killer if the price will be set at the same range as the Polaris card. The partner cards, which have not yet been revealed yet, could also dish out more performance as the custom AIB GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 GPUs have shown.