NVIDIA 1060 Released

Today is the day. NIVIDA releases the GTX1060 @ MSRP US$249. Every place I’ve looked they are sold out.

GTX1060 - Released July 2016

GTX1060 – Released July 2016

The new GTX1060 has the same performance as the GTX980 but, for less money, even at eBay prices. At least for now. It takes time for those on eBay to catch up with the market.

The 1060 has an advantage over the 980 when it comes to VR. The render pipeline has been altered and parallel processing enhanced. The 1060 can run more threads, render processes. But the biggest advantage is the SMP feature, Simultaneous Multi-Projection. SMP is in a section of the pipeline just after the geometry processing. It can tweak the position of the geometry before handing it to the texture rendering processing, where polygons are painted and shaded. This allows the faster rendering of stereo images for VR headsets.

There are other enhancements. But, SMP is specifically for VR stereo images. I am not sure how the hardware will enhance render speed for single image games. But, I suspect it is way faster. Road to VR has a review of the card: Hands-on: NVIDIA Launches GTX 1060 and Benchmarks Against AMD’s RX 480.

All their comparison benchmarks are against the AMD480 and the GTX960 using DX11 & 12. I don’t see any using OpenGL.

Also, DO NOT expect the SMP to kickin with Second Life™. In researching the NVIDIA 980 and 1060/1080 to decide what I’ll be buying, I found that the game has to be written to use SMP. So, NVIDIA was making a thing out of Unreal and Unity game engines incorporating use of the feature into their game engines.

I expect Project Sansar to take advantages of SMP, but not Second Life. There are so few SL people using VR headsets Oz Linden decided to pull the Oculus Rift Project Viewer when people complained about performance. I understand their disappointment and, I think, Oz’s decision. If I’m right, any work, if any, on Oculus will be behind closed doors at the Lab and I think it highly likely staff will be working on other projects that have more effect on other aspects of SL.

I do find the current state of SL rendering in the Linden viewer disappointing. Exploring Hair Fair this year was a sad experience. Most of the avatars I saw were gray shapes with body parts and clothes sticking out at odd angles. This is the first year it has ever been this bad.

The Alchemy and RLV viewers were doing a better render job, faster FPS and less time to render a scene, than the Linden and Firestorm viewers. While I had fewer mini-freezes with the Alchemy and RLV viewers I still had freezes. Computer restarts and running only the viewer helped.

Of course the problems were in regions with 40 avatars. Even when I had my head inside a shop, garages this year, with a limited field of view things were slow. It was better with limited view but, not a lot.

I am looking forward to running a set of comparisons between my old and new machines in SL.

6 thoughts on “NVIDIA 1060 Released

  1. Wait for Vegas from AMD.

    Otherwise, go with RX 480 for Price per Performance, if you have FreeSync Montior, and if you care about DX12/Vulkan support for the future games.

    1060 doesn’t have SLI port, due to dirty marketing tactic to keep you from buying cheap options versus getting single 1080 card.

    I really can’t see SL or Sansar going to last any longer than buying new GPU this year. People are dropping out faster lately and cashing out. Even I’m not sure why but… it’s long over due.
    http://www.gridsurvey.com/charts/lindexstock.png

    • If AMD/ATI had decent support for OpenGL, I might consider it.

      In general the 1060 2% to 15% faster than the RX480.

      True, the 1060 does not do SLI. But, neither does SL… at least not well. There was a time when when two 460’s would out perform a GTX480 for less money than the GTX480. NVIDIA changed their pricing structure. We don’t see that happening any more.

      Game sites are generally showing single card performance so good duel cards are not worth the money for the small performance gains. I don’t plan to run duel cards, so I haven’t looked that closely at the numbers. But, the PCIe bus can generally not handle two x16 cards and cuts them down to x8. So, it makes sense that a single card can get very close to duel card performance for most of the gaming community.

  2. I have never seen a performance gain with SLI in SL and I tried numerous ways to implement it with 2 GTX 460s. In fact the performance was far worse. GPU-Z showed both cards were in fact being used but the fps were very low in comparison to a single card. How did you manage to get SLI benchmarks higher than a single card?

    • I’ve only ever used a single card…

      Some that use dual cards do get better frame rates. But, the last time I heard anyone talk about that was 3 or more years ago. Then they could be assigned so one rendered and one did math. Essentially one decompressed and decrypted files while the other rendered the scene.

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