Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB)
Room to expand.
Creeping up to around $400 will net you a card that can do 1080p with absolutely all the bells and whistles turned on and cranked up, and also offer some breathing room to keep that up in any future titles that prove to be a bit more demanding. Alternatively, if you’re using a higher-definition 1440p screen or a 27-inch ultrawide, spending this much on a GPU should generally let you play at High detail settings.
In this space, you’ve basically got two $400 cards going head to head — the Radeon RX 580 with 4GB of memory, and the GeForce GTX 1060 with 6GB of RAM. While there’s also an 8GB version of the RX 580, it doesn’t actually complicate things: at $450–$480, it’s 10–20% more expensive, but in most current games, it doesn’t improve framerates more than a percent or two over the 4GB edition. In other words, paired with this mid-range GPU, doubling the memory is not quite worth the extra $30.
Coming back to that main contest, then, it’s often a very close competition, but the 1060 pulled ahead enough to crack a slight lead across our 15-game suite at 1080p. They were basically even at 1440p, and at 4K, the RX 580 was actually 2% faster — but neither card can actually produce playable framerates at that high a resolution setting.
Don’t count on getting too much of AMD’s historical ‘speed increases via driver updates’ either — like the RX 570 on the previous page, the 580 is really a tweaked RX 480 in disguise.
While the 4GB RX 580 delivers OK value, it’s been slightly outcompeted by the GTX 1060 at this price.
Verdict
Gets its nose ahead of AMD’s Radeon RX 580 in the race for the crown.