1060 6GB worth it for ~$200 these days? Or wait until year end?

I'm wondering, is it worth it at this point in time to get a 1060 6GB whenever it hits the ~$200-220 price point? I won't wait for Volta as it's likely the x60 card won't come until March/April.

Seeing all this Ethereum fever, I just sold my RX 480 on eBay for $120 more than I paid for it (while happy with the RX480, drivers never seemed as polished as Nvidia's and I was never able to setup custom res 21:9 to work properly without stretching on my 40" 4K monitor).

I have a mountain of work for the next few weeks and little time to game anyway so I could wait until Black Friday or the end of the year. What would you guys do?

Meanwhile, trying to play Doom on the i5-7500's HD630. Medium settings, 720p:

I know you already sold the card but if you were just going to get a 1060 6 GB you should have kept the RX 480. Other than power draw (or if you had a G-Sync monitor) price for price the RX 480 is a better card, IMO. Unfortunately, now you're going to be playing whack-a-mole with outrageous prices thanks to the mining craze. IIRC, the monitor you have is neither FreeSync or G-Sync so you're not locked into either brand and I'd consider going up a notch (used 980 Ti or Fury X would be good choices simply due to not being as power-efficient and thus unappealing to miners).

Probably not what you wanted to hear... I know how painful gaming on iGPUs is. My wife and I played on the iGPU for a year before we picked up the 1070s in the sig,

Algrim said:

Probably not what you wanted to hear...

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No, this is great, I like different points of view to make informed decisions! At the end of the day, I still gained $120 (bought it for $150, sold it for $270) so it was worth the sell. As you said, power draw will be the main difference as both GPUs perform similarly. However, the big sticking point for me was never being able to force 21:9 properly, which I've done with nvidia for years (this was my 1st AMD card). Not being able to do that has bugged the heck out of me from day 1 (early on I even thought the 480 may have a defect, reinstalled my GTX770 and I could do 21:9 no problem) so that's a powerful driver. This may sound dumb, but I also do miss the Nvidia Gameworks effects... smoke specially, those turbulence particles on Batman were amazing.

I probably won't play much in the next few months as I have so much work to do (teaching an overload class this fall semester...) so instead of playing price whack-a-mole I set a couple price watches and whenever they ping me, I'll buy at the ~$200 mark. If I game in the next few weeks, it'll mainly be to laugh at how bad the Intel HD 630 is

I don't have a 21:9 monitor nor did I have one when I was on my AMD card, so I'm of no help there. I know there are quite a few AMD people who could have chimed in if you brought it up when you had the card. But, it's sold now, so that's not on option to dig in further, unfortunately.

Oh trust me I've read countless threads and followed several forums to figure out how to do this. I tried for 2 full months, finally I gave up (I'm also not new to hardware, been doing this for 2 decades now, it really shouldn't be this hard for someone like me). With nvidia I had zero problems to force a 21:9 aspect ratio on a big 16:9 screen. For whatever reason, my nvidia experience has been better overall.

I did like the RX480, but there were enough little cons that progressively I got tired of it. If AMD improved their driver and features I may still have it, but alas, it was not to be.

Ended up going for a Gigabyte 1060 3GB Mini OC on a good deal. That'll hold me over until Volta

Congratulations on your new card!

Very nice! Enjoy it.

euskalzabe said:

Oh trust me I've read countless threads and followed several forums to figure out how to do this. I tried for 2 full months, finally I gave up (I'm also not new to hardware, been doing this for 2 decades now, it really shouldn't be this hard for someone like me). With nvidia I had zero problems to force a 21:9 aspect ratio on a big 16:9 screen. For whatever reason, my nvidia experience has been better overall.

I did like the RX480, but there were enough little cons that progressively I got tired of it. If AMD improved their driver and features I may still have it, but alas, it was not to be.

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I had no problem running a custom resolution of 1920x818 on my 21:9 projector screen with and AMD 285 and a Fury X. I never owned a rx480

Archaea said:

I had no problem running a custom resolution of 1920x818 on my 21:9 projector screen with and AMD 285 and a Fury X. I never owned a rx480

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Yeah, it certainly wasn't normal, but I'm also not inexperienced. Been doing this for 2 decades (now I feel old ). I tried several 21:9 resolutions and they either didn't work or would be vertically stretched, no matter what combinations of resolution, timing, etc. I attempted. While I still had the GTX770, popped it in and boom, in 10 seconds I was rocking 2560x1080 and 1920x810 when necessary for performance. I can only conclude it's got to do with drivers - which is what's been driving me away from AMD since I got the 480 in February. It's too bad, as other than that, the card performed well and I was enjoying it, but it was a deal breaker for me - and with the mining craze, it seemed like a good strategy.

euskalzabe said:

Yeah, it certainly wasn't normal, but I'm also not inexperienced. Been doing this for 2 decades (now I feel old ). I tried several 21:9 resolutions and they either didn't work or would be vertically stretched, no matter what combinations of resolution, timing, etc. I attempted. While I still had the GTX770, popped it in and boom, in 10 seconds I was rocking 2560x1080 and 1920x810 when necessary for performance. I can only conclude it's got to do with drivers - which is what's been driving me away from AMD since I got the 480 in February. It's too bad, as other than that, the card performed well and I was enjoying it, but it was a deal breaker for me - and with the mining craze, it seemed like a good strategy.

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Monitor setting in combination with driver settings? In the context of scaling. i.e. You set the custom red, but the driver or monitor scaled/stretched it?

Archaea said:

Monitor setting in combination with driver settings? In the context of scaling. i.e. You set the custom red, but the driver or monitor scaled/stretched it?

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I blame drivers, yes. The monitor works at all specified resolutions, as I've used them with my old 770 on it without a hitch. For some reason, it was impossible to set with the 480: I'd set the 21:9 resolution, and it'd switch to it, but it'd vertically stretch to fill the whole 16:9 screen anyway, so it was useless. After months of trying, I gave up. Then the mining craze was the last push I needed: sell, get a 1060 with the money, and still make some extra cash. It's a win-win, although my inner nerd remains frustrated that I was never able to figure out why 21:9 refused to work on the 480

Now that I'm back on Nvidia with a GTX1060, I FINALLY figured out why 21:9 works well with these cards! Notice the override option in the nvidia control panel:



I could find no similar option with the RX 480, so 21:9 resolutions would always be stretched vertically. Once I checked that override option, the 1060 immediately output 21:9 properly with black bars on the top and bottom.

Mystery solved. Seems like I need to remain on Nvidia while they're the only ones to allow me to do this properly/easily on a 16:9 monitor.

euskalzabe said:

Now that I'm back on Nvidia with a GTX1060, I FINALLY figured out why 21:9 works well with these cards! Notice the override option in the nvidia control panel:.

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Can you tell me why you want to do this? Is it to lower the resolution on demanding games to get better performance or do you just prefer this ratio?

anon2020 said:

Can you tell me why you want to do this? Is it to lower the resolution on demanding games to get better performance or do you just prefer this ratio?

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I need a BIG monitor that I can use for work and play (no space for 2 big ones). With a 40" 4K TV, I work with large 16:9 area for my work files and scans (16-18th century materials, far easier to work with zoomed in high-res) and force 21:9 aspect ratio when gaming since I like the FOV. I only adjust resolution as needed for performance: 3840x1620, 2560x1080, 1920x810.

cpuspeed said:

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/UnableToSetGPUScaling.aspx

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That doesn't work in my case. That only sets up GPU scaling, but it doesn't force said scaling, ignoring whatever an engine wants to do. That's why the RX480 would correctly switch to the 21:9 resolution, but stretch it to the 16:9 panel. I've read every AMD article on it, blog posts, forum threads... for months. I've tried it all, every single Radeon software option. There's no way to force the scaling on AMD drivers. Now that I've realized why it works with Nvidia, I realize it's easy precisely because they allow me to force my choice and ignore the scaling method of applications. That alone, in my (granted, niche) usage scenario, is enough to keep me on Nvidia for the time being.

I think 1060 6gb is amazing card. Just fantastic, especially for 1080p. But seeing You have this huge 21:9... how is it ?
I guess if scaling is good You can run 60fps at 1080p with everything new.

HiCZoK said:

I think 1060 6gb is amazing card. Just fantastic, especially for 1080p. But seeing You have this huge 21:9... how is it ?
I guess if scaling is good You can run 60fps at 1080p with everything new.

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Yeah, I mean, size doesn't really matter, only resolution. Older titles (HL2, etc) work great at 1620p. 1080p works fine for any modern game on high settings. I only do 810p for newer games which can't really handle high resolution, but so far with the 1060 that hasn't been necessary. Of course that' all for 21:9 resolutions, on 16:9 1080p is fine pretty much all the time as long as I don't go crazy with textures that drive me over VRAM - which, there's no point anyway when you play at 1080p, only 4K reveals those details well.