It is with certainty that we can say that AMD will release a 12nm fabbed version of Polaris, likely called Radeon RX 590. With that knowledge in mind NVIDIA will be releasing a refresh GeForce GTX 1060, this round, however, it’ll be fitted with faster GDDR5X graphics memory.
On the US NVIDIA website the new refresh, SKU can be found. By using GDDR5X over GDDR5 NVIDIA is able to create an answer on price and performance towards the new RX 590, at least that is the thesis. The new model will be priced 299 USD.
The current model has 6 GB 8 Gbps GDDR5 memory on a 192-bit bus. The GDDR5X model will likely get 9 or maybe 10 Gbps GDDR5X graphics memory offering an increased up-to 240 GB/s memory bandwidth (coming from 192 GB/s). Time will tell what this does in performance. We expect AMD to get 5 to 10% faster with the new 12nm models, perhaps the GDDR5X memory on the GTX 1060 can offer a similar increase. With this new refresh SKU one thing becomes clear as well, a GeForce GTX 2060 is not going be released anytime soon.
