NVIDIA goes to war with AMD, and mid-range consumers on a budget have everything to gain

In the wake of AMD’s latest Radeon unveiling, targeting budget consumers with a low-priced graphic card built on Polaris 10 architecture, NVIDIA has revealed a budget option of its own, priced around $200, which is a crucial price range catering to budget consumers in the gaming category.

The new GeForce GTX 1060 while half as powerful as the GTX 1080, offers similar performance as the GTX 980, with the added bonus of increased efficiency and a lower price, as well as fitting the requirement of VR systems like Oculus Rift. Even at half the CUDA cores of the GTX (1,280), this card still packs 6GB of GDDR5 RAM, and 1.7GHz clock speed, as well as five outputs, namely DVI, HDMI and three DisplayPorts.

The GTX 1060 will launch officially on July 19th, and judging by the shorter length of the card, the evidence suggests that NVIDIA will let third party manufacturers come up with their own cooling solutions, including water-cooling systems.

As previously pointed out by The Verge, there seems to be a fundamental lack of reviews for this card, from testers and insiders, which leaves a lot to the imagination, aside from the trickled-down rep coming from the GTX 1080. By that token, it’s too early to say whether or not the GTX 1060 will be a worthy opponent of the AMD Radeon RX 480. Both cards share a similar price range, and somewhat similar specs, at least on paper.

The emphasis is definitely on VR, especially as these cards are destined for PC builders, enthusiasts and gamers with an interest in high-end graphic processing beyond the expectations of the average consumer. This market is set to widen with the advance of VR systems, like Oculus, and other upcoming devices promising to offer an increasingly refined virtual reality experience. With that said, competition for lower ends of the market, between AMD and NVIDIA is a healthy sign of what’s coming for the Windows PC in the future.