NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Offers Great Performance On Linux

Overall, the CUDA/OpenCL performance of the GeForce GTX 1060 is quite good and comparable to the OpenGL/Vulkan results with performing in line with the GeForce GTX 980 for most workloads. The GeForce GTX 1060 represents a huge upgrade over the previous-generation GeForce GTX 960.

Well, if you are looking to spend just $250~300 on a graphics card, the GeForce GTX 1060 is a hell of an offering! The GeForce GTX 1060 marks a significant upgrade over the GeForce GTX 960. For less than $300 you can have the performance of a GeForce GTX 980, what launched less than two years ago at $549 USD. With the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver, the GeForce GTX 1060 boasts great support for OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, CUDA, and VDPAU video decoding as well as NV-ENC video encoding. For those not looking to spend around $400 for the GeForce GTX 1070, the GTX 1060 offers quite a lot of potential and delivers excellent value and performance-per-Watt.

About the only reason to go with the Radeon RX 480 over the GeForce GTX 1060 would be if wanting an open-source driver stack. The Radeon RX 480 has been supported from day-one by the fully open-source AMDGPU+RadeonSI driver stack (as well as AMDGPU-PRO) while any open-source support for the GeForce GTX 1000 series is still some time away. So far there's just been the GP100 open-source support with no GP104/GP106 support yet. It will likely be some months before the necessary firmware is released. Even when that firmware is out there for the open-source Nouveau driver developers, it still will likely be some time before re-clocking and other features are implemented: the GeForce GTX 900 series open-source support is still next to useless due to the lack of re-clocking / power management and other missing functionality. So if you are serious about an open-source driver, definitely go for the Radeon RX 480 but for those who want a Linux desktop that "just works" regardless of a binary-only driver, the GeForce GTX 1060 offers much better performance and power efficiency and all of the other leading features of Pascal.