Gadgetory

the GTX 1063 gigabyte cards existence is curious it's one of these two they look the same they look the same even in the name its gtx 1060 but it has one less SM so in this regard the change between the ten $6,200 card and a 10 $6,250 card is actually somewhat significant it's more than just a VRAM difference what we've got is a three gigabyte card that's the other one a three gigabyte card and this has nine SMS it's got 128 fewer CUDA cores so instead of 1280 it's 1152 and on the six gigabyte card which has ten SMS and is running the full 1280 CUDA cores Nvidia is advertising a five percent performance drop in the GTX 1063 gigabyte despite its 10 percent decrease in SMS the card also lists a $50 cheaper price than the six gigabyte GTX 1060 making it more directly competitive with the RX 484 gigabyte and parallel in marketing strategy though that execution was different the curious part is why Nvidia decided that this card should remain with the 1060 branding but we'll talk about that after the benchmarks before getting to those just a quick note to clear things up we've seen some comments asking why this isn't a 4 gigabyte card instead of a 3 gigabyte card because of the way the gtx 1060 build its memory subsystem because of the 192 bit interface it's not possible to run a 4 gigabyte solution on a gtx 1060 they would be different GPUs generally when you see a multiple of 3 like a 6 gigabyte card that card will only ship in other multiples of three like a three gigabyte card the same is true for 4 and 8 gigabyte units you'll never see a 4 gig card with a 3 gigabyte alternative it will always be 4 gigabytes or 2 gigabytes or 8 or something similar for these tests we're going to strictly cover the GTX 10 60s so that means other cards on the chart normally like the 1080 1070 or X 480 rx 470 none of those will be on these charts because we're just looking at these 2 3 vs. 6 gigabytes I'll throw that one in just to have it there that is also GTX 1060 it's an overclocked 1060 by MSI whereas these two are the stock clocks so we are running a 1060 founders Edition stock clock 17:08 megahertz boost versus an EVGA GTX 1063 gigabyte card so it's six versus three also 1708 megahertz boost boost 3.0 has some variants but this is as close to identical as we can get for the test memory clocks are the same and we're really just looking at the FPS here so there won't be a thermal comparison is not worth doing because there's no like for like gtx 1060 s that we have to compare that would really see a difference in thermals from the vram difference and from the 2-2 core difference if you want to see the RX 4 80 1070 960 all the other cards hit the link in the description below for the full article which contains the review and test methodology starting with GTA 5 at 1080p and very high and ultra settings the gtx 1066 gigabyte card performs at 95 FPS average with 60 6.3 fps and 60 point 7 FPS lows trailed by the 1063 gigabyte card at eighty nine point three FS Everage 64 1% low and 56 0.1% lows at this resolution the differences are largely inconsequential to gameplay but are measurable the performance difference is about 6.3 percent between the two with the msi 1060 gaming x marginally ahead of these a result of its higher clock rate at 1440p we're looking at 68 FPS average for the 60 gigabyte card or about 63 FPS average for the 3 gigabyte card the 0.1% lows are mostly the same between the two and that remains the case for 4k which is obviously too taxing for the 1060 anyway but a worthwhile benchmark to see if any hidden failures are rooted out with a three gigabyte model shadow of mordor produces more varied results at 1080p the gtx 1066 gigabyte card operates at eighty seven point seven FPS average with lows ranked at sixty eight point seven and sixty six FPS for the 0.1% low metrics the three gigabyte card runs at 77 FPS average a percent change of 13.5 from old to new with the lows of most noticeably different at 45 FPS versus 66 fps the six gigabyte card that's a pretty big gap move into 1440p the trend continues and posts the gtx 1066 gigabyte card at 63 FPS average 51 one percent low and 49 0.1 percent lows the three gigabyte unit sustains 58.7 FPS average 45 point three one percent low and thirty six point three 0.1% lows as somewhat noticeable and significant difference at times depending on what's going on in the game Assassin's Creed syndicate was revived because it has historically shown us fairly large performance gaps between four gigabyte and a gigabyte or four and two gigabyte solutions like the rx 480 which in a four gigabyte model struggled in its lows when compared to the eight gigabyte rx 480 in this benchmark though we're seeing similar performance from each card the 1066 EQ by unit is slightly ahead and there's no game breaking disparity between the two stutters our infrequent on both devices and those are mostly identical OpenGL results with doom are largely the same between the GTX 1060 3 gigabytes and 6 gigabyte cards 1080p results are just under 100 FPS average and the lows are fairly tightly timed for each Vulcan testing does produce some screwy results though the 6 gigabyte card vastly outperforms the 3 gigabyte card with Vulcan enabled posting a 1080p performance difference of 20 6.5 FPS that's huge or 37 percent at 1440p we see similarly tied OpenGL performance both cards operating around 65 fps more or less which is then tanked for the 3 gigabyte unit with Vulcan Vulcan positions the GTX 1063 gigabyte card at 50 FPS with a 6 gigabyte ecard at 63 fps that's a difference of 13 FPS or 27% this difference only seems to exist with Vulcan for Doom and because the cards still perform better with OpenGL you'd be best off taking that setup instead call of duty black ops 3 is a title fairly sensitive to clock rate and vram changes and we can normally rely on it to show swings between similar spec cards but it sort of depends on what's going on under the hood and if there's any major pre overclock at 1080p the GTX 10-6 six gigabyte card is performing that one 22.7 FPS average with a three gigabyte unit following at one 13.7 that's performance change of about eight percent the one percent low values are gapped by 10 FPS with a 0.1% low is similarly spaced at 87 and 79 FPS this maintains a performance difference in the low metrics of about 8 to 10% 1440p post slightly bigger scaling gaps with the 6 gigabyte card at 78 FPS average and the 3 gigabyte card at 71 FPS average that's a 10 percent performance difference or twice the 5% advertised by Nvidia 1% lows are also fairly gaped at 60.3 and 53.7 FPS we tested a lot more games on this - you can check the article link the description below for Metro last light the division and a couple of other games so it mostly comes down to if the difference is actually noticeable in gameplay and if so is the $50 saved on the 3 gigabyte unit actually worth the performance drop in most games from what we've tested we're seeing about a 6 to 7 percent performance change from the 6 gigabyte down to the 3 gigabyte card and in some games like doom with Vulcan the changes are pretty massive but in that scenario you would be better off with OpenGL anyway and there are some sort of existing problems with Vulcan on and Vidia with the the new cards to begin with so that's one of those scenarios where there is an alternative and it exists within doom you can go to OpenGL but when we look at the performance disparity between the two it's pretty large 27% in some 1440p tests more than 30% in other tests so it really comes down to the API at some level with doom specifically what we can't extrapolate is how does that impact these cards in the future because these API is it's not just the developer poles Vulcan off the shelf puts it in their game and it's done they very specifically build for an API so doom could well be an outlier but we just don't have a good way to know because Vulcan is still so new to the market but we have the x12 tests and other tests in the article length description below if you want to read more specifically about the new api's and their impact on these cards as for the other games the x11 games especially black ops 3 shows a difference of in some cases of 10% at the high end for the performance change between three and six gigabyte cards and that is of course accounting for the one less SM as well in the three gigabyte unit and shadow of mordor shows a 14% change is pretty big and the biggest for the DX 11 games the three gigabyte gtx 1060 is fine for some use cases and there are only a few applications where it's frames really dip hard but when they do it's pretty big and can be noticeable that can be the difference of adding noticeable chopped to 1440p gameplay in some instances if you're trying to use this from 1440p because the gtx 1060 can actually handle that resolution at least in its six gigabyte variant with the wrong settings combination the changes are particularly noticeable with that vram intensive application workload on the three gigabyte card and going forward we'd still recommend the six gigabyte gtx 1060 for most use cases it's one of the only cards this generation available at its actual MSRP near 250 and that makes it an agreeable purchase this is a similar situation to the 4 gigabyte rx 480 which we generally would forego in favor of the 8 gigabyte model that said we did see some larger swings in the 4 versus 8 gigabyte our X 480 performance as for naming that's another matter this isn't a lower vram gtx 1060 it's a different video card an entire SM is disabled including 1/10 of the cards processors and it's half the vram capacity the GTX 10 63 gigabyte should absolutely not be called a GTX 1060 for consumers who are already faced with seemingly endless variants of AIB partner cards X's and Z's and gaming's and Bessie and SSC or FTW or Strix are classified and so on and so on this only further obfuscates the gtx 1060 pool further it's not a gtx 1060 it's completely different in that one sm is disabled so invidious choice to name a card as such will confuse buyers into thinking it's just a 1060 with half the vram which is plainly false this is a gtx 10:50 TI and nvidia decided not to call it that it's a marketing play that doesn't mean it's a bad thing all these companies make marketing plays and NVIDIA is certainly not alone in the video card market in that regard but this isn't one that we can brush aside as harmless because users will inevitably make the incorrect assumption that the only difference is a VRAM as for being VR ready which I believe at least one of these boxes says on it don't buy this for VR the three gigabyte difference does matter there a lot of VR applications are recommending four gigabytes or more of memory on the video card which obviously three gigabyte card does not fulfill that requirement or recommendation and VR has got very tight tolerances so looking at these 3d non VR games if we're losing six to seven percent performance kind of at a low average that amount of performance is a big deal in VR and obviously scannings are different there there's dynamic settings changes on the fly all that stuff but a couple percent is the difference between being able to play a game at a slightly higher setting or with greater fluidity and VR and not being able to do that though we are still working on VR benchmarking and that will come up in the future at some point hopefully semi soon as for the three gigabyte GTX 1060 it has place in a few bills so if you've got an odd budget distribution the card does deserve to exist I've seen some people say that it doesn't deserve to exist I would say there is a place for the unit I do take issue with the name but as a product $50 cheaper it's okay where it is if you've got a budget distribution that calls for a cheaper video card maybe you want to invest the $50 in an SSD but you're still building a budget system or get a better power supply or something like that it's okay there but where possible we would still recommend going for either a six gigabyte GTX 1060 or in applications where it makes sense and rx 480 at 8 gigabytes and you can check our 480 and our 1060 reviews for more discussion on those specific scenarios when you might want one or the other but for three gigabytes for six gigabytes I would mean six three is okay in some specific budgets so that's all for this time as always patreon like the post well video link the description below for more information subscribe for more I'll see you all next time you you