Official NVIDIA GTX 1060 3GB Specs: One SM Disabled, 3GB Framebuffer

By Steve Burke Published August 18, 2016 at 12:04 pm

Hardware

There were rumors of a GTX 1060 3GB card, but the launch of the GTX 1060 featured a single 6GB model. Almost exactly one month later, nVidia has announced its 3GB GTX 1060 with 1152 CUDA Cores, down from 1280, and a halved framebuffer. The card will also run fewer TMUs as a result of disabling 1 SM, for a total of 9 simultaneous multiprocessors versus the 10 SMs on the GTX 1060 6GB. This brings down TMU count from 80 to 72 (with 8x texture map units per SM), making for marginally reduced power coupled with a greatly reduced framebuffer.

(Update: The card is already available on etailers, see here.)

In theory, this will most heavily impact 0.1% low and 1% low frame performance, as we showed in the AMD RX 480 8GB vs. 4GB comparison. Games which rely less upon Post FX and more heavily upon large resolution textures and maps (as in shadow, normal, specular – not as in levels) will most immediately show the difference. Assassin's Creed, Black Ops III (in some use cases), and Mirror's Edge Catalyst are poised to show the greatest differences between the two. NVidia has advertised an approximate 5% performance difference when looking at the GTX 1060 3GB vs. GTX 1060 6GB, but that number will almost certainly be blown out when looking at VRAM stressing titles.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB vs. 3GB Specs

NVIDIA Pascal vs. Maxwell Specs Comparison
	GTX 1080	GTX 1070	GTX 1060 3GB	GTX 1060 6GB	GTX 960
GPU	GP104-400 Pascal	GP104-200 Pascal	GP106 Pascal	GP106 Pascal	GM204
Transistor Count	7.2B	7.2B	4.4B	4.4B	2.94B
Fab Process	16nm FinFET	16nm FinFET	16nm FinFET	16nm FinFET	28nm
CUDA Cores	2560	1920	1152	1280	1024
GPCs	4	3	2	2	2
SMs	20	15	9	10	8
TPCs	20	15	9	10	-
TMUs	160	120	72	80	64
ROPs	64	64	48 (?)	48	32
Core Clock	1607MHz	1506MHz	1506MHz	1506MHz	1126MHz
Boost Clock	1733MHz	1683MHz	1708MHz	1708MHz	1178MHz
FP32 TFLOPs	9TFLOPs	6.5TFLOPs	3.85TFLOPs	3.85TFLOPs	2.4TFLOPs
Memory Type	GDDR5X	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5
Memory Capacity	8GB	8GB	3GB	6GB	2GB, 4GB
Memory Clock	10Gbps GDDR5X	4006MHz	8Gbps	8Gbps	7Gbps
Memory Interface	256-bit	256-bit	192-bit	192-bit	128-bit
Memory Bandwidth	320.32GB/s	256GB/s	192GB/s	192GB/s	115GB/s
TDP	180W	150W	120W	120W	120W
Power Connectors	1x 8-pin	1x 8-pin	1x 6-pin	1x 6-pin	1x 6-pin
Release Date	5/27/2016	6/10/2016	August, 2016	7/19/2016	01/22/15
Release Price	Reference: $700 MSRP: $600	Reference: $450 MSRP: $380	MSRP: $200	Reference: $300 MSRP: $250	$200

In other marketing language, nVidia directly claims a 10% speed increase in the 3GB GTX 1060 over the 8GB RX 480. Again, that'll depend on the game and can't just be applied as a blanket performance swing, so we'll validate that ourselves.

Above: Ignore one SM. That's the 3GB model.

Availability of the GTX 1060 3GB card will begin “over the next couple of weeks,” with a driver update pushed today to support the card. NVidia does not plan to seed the cards directly for review, but that won't stop us from running 3GB vs. 6GB comparisons and validating the percentage performance claims. The clock-rate is actually the same on both models, and the same goes for the memory clock -- so performance should be mostly identical, sans the core difference and games with real memory dependencies.

The card will be priced at $200, landing it about $50 cheaper than the low-end of the GTX 1060 MSRP, and equal with the 4GB RX 480. We have not received word if this will have a reference card.

- Steve “Lelldorianx” Burke.

Last modified on August 18, 2016 at 12:04 pm

Steve Burke

Steve started GamersNexus back when it was just a cool name, and now it's grown into an expansive website with an overwhelming amount of features. He recalls his first difficult decision with GN's direction: "I didn't know whether or not I wanted 'Gamers' to have a possessive apostrophe -- I mean, grammatically it should, but I didn't like it in the name. It was ugly. I also had people who were typing apostrophes into the address bar - sigh. It made sense to just leave it as 'Gamers.'"

First world problems, Steve. First world problems.