GTX 1060 hits this month with 980 performance for $249

The GTX 1060 will be as powerful as Nvidia’s GTX 980 card but only consume 120 watts of power and cost about $249 when it arrives on July 19, the company announced this morning.

Cards are expected from ASUS, Colorful, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision 3D, MSI, Palit, PNY and Zotac. Nvidia’s own founders edition of the card will sell for $299.

The 1060 is built on a new chip called the GP106. Both the 1080 and 1070 use the GP104. The new card features 1,280 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8Gbps and a boost clock of 1.7GHz, which can be overclocked to 2GHz.

As with both the 1070 and 1080 Founders Edition cards, the GTX 1060 Founders Edition has three DisplayPorts, an HDMI port and a DVI port.

Nvidia says that "across the top gaming titles, GTX 1060 is on average 15 percent faster and over 75 percent more power efficient than the closest competitive product."

Just last week, AMD unveiled it’s similarly priced Radeon RX 480. The card sells for $199 for the 4 GB version and $239 for the 8 GB version and our benchmarks showed it outperformed the GTX 980 Ti on some games.

We’ll be running our own benchmarks for the GTX 1060 and publishing them when that embargo lifts on July 19 at 9 a.m. ET. I’m very interested to see how the 1060 compaires to the RX 480.

Nvidia also announced today that Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst and The Witcher 3 would be getting Ansel integration this month. Ansel is Nvidia’s built-in feature for capturing in-game screenshots. Support in Catalyst should be live today and The Witcher 3’s support arrives later in the month.

Finally, Nvidia said that VR Funhouse will be available for free later this month on Steam. The game will work on GTX 1080, 1070 and 1060 cards and with the Vive headset.

Make sure you check out our reviews of the GTX 1070, 1080 and Radeon RX 480.