RX 570 Vs GTX 1060

AMD and Nvidia have been battling for years to hold the upper hand in graphics cards, and these two older GPUs are proof of how the companies have been producing chips in direct competition with each other.

Designed to hit the popular market for mid-range GPUs, AMD’s Radeon RX 570 is a step down from the RX 580 which is 20% faster for only $30 more, but it’s a great option if you’re sticking to a stricter budget. Plus, with overclocking, you can even boost the performance to that of the 580 for a cheaper price, making it excellent value for money.

Like always, we’re inclined to say straight off the bat that the Nvidia chip outperforms its AMD counterpart, but we won’t fully judge a graphics card before we’ve tested it. Instead, we’ll review both GPUs to compare their specifications and performance.

Keep reading to find out which of these budget-friendly graphics cards is the best choice.

Just like the preceding RX 470 GPU, the RX 570 operates on the second generation Polaris architecture. It has 2048 cores which is almost double the number of cores featured on the GTX 1060, which has far fewer with just 1280 cores.

The GTX 1060 features Nvidia Pascal which was one of the most advanced architectures of its time and delivers consistently high performances. This provides an improvement of up to 3X the standards of the graphics cards that came before it including speed and efficiency.

For easy comparison, here are the clock speeds for both GPUs:

RX 570

• Base clock speed: 1168 MHz
• Boosted clock speed: 1244 MHz

GTX 1060

• Base clock speed: 1506 MHz
• Boosted clock speed: 1809 MHz

You can see from the above that the Nvidia GTX 1060 is quite a bit faster than the AMD RX 570. In order to hit their target shader count, AMD disabled some of them leaving the RX 570 GPU with 2048 shading units, 128 texture mapping units, and 32 ROPs.

Boosting the clock speed by overclocking your GPU makes a big difference for both cards, although there’s a larger gap between the base performance of the 1660 and the overclocked performance.

Cooling is an important element to consider if you think you will overclock your GPU to achieve the maximum boosted speed for an enhanced gaming experience. You’ll need to take into account the extra strain this will put on your graphics card and be sure not to overheat it.

The maximum GPU temperature for the GTX 1060 is 94 degrees Celsius, whereas, for the RX 570, it’s as low as 75 degrees Celsius. This is a massive difference, and you might want to look at buying a separate cooling system, although keep in mind that this would be an additional cost for you.

To keep it cool, the GTX 1060 has excellent thermals that help try to maintain lower temperatures, even when you’re playing a particularly demanding game or under the most intense conditions. Both chips feature a dual-slot cooling system.

In terms of operating volume, the RX 570 is significantly quieter than the GTX 1060 as it runs at just 38dB, which is practically a whisper compared to the 47.1dB produced by the GTX 1060.

Trying to decide between two GPUs can be a difficult task, as the different specifications can leave you wondering what’s the best for your current PC setup. Luckily, the dimensions of the graphics card is an easy choice, as it needs to be able to fit in with your existing rig.

The RX 570 has a 232 mm-squared die area with 5,700 million transistors, and power travels from the 6-pin power connector. The chip itself measures 241mm in length with a dual-slot cooling system.

Connected via a PCI-Express 3.0 x 16 interface, the GTX 1060 is slightly longer than the RX 570 lengthwise as it measures 250mm, and it’s 111mm in width with a dual-slot cooling system. Both of these are pretty average sizes for graphics cards.

Games like Battlefield V saw the RX 570 take a slight lead over the GTX 1060 at 1080p with a larger gap between their performance at 1440p, whereas titles such as Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of Mordor have very similar average benchmarking results which see each GPU taking over the other interchangeably.

Playing at 1080p showcases the best of both cards and you’ll see a more noticeable difference with games like GTA V and Doom (Vulkan), with a clear lead by the GTX 1060. Unsurprising as GeForce cards tend to be a great choice for these games.

Even with the highest settings, 60 FPS is achievable with a number of titles at 1080p. If you reign in the settings you could see an improvement in the performance in both graphics cards at 1440p, although it offers decent frame rates either way.

Our testing shows that with the GTX 1060, you can expect around 4% improvement on frame rate speed with an extra 3 FPS on average compared to the RX 570. Both cards would seriously struggle at 4K and Ultrawide 1440p, so for this, you’d need to look for a higher-end Graphics card.

Both the RX 570 and the GTX 1060 from AMD and Nvidia respectively were released way before the breakthrough of ray tracing technology of which we reap the shadow and lighting benefits today.

This means that, unfortunately, neither GPU can take advantage of ray tracing nor DLSS as they don’t have the architecture or the cores to support it.

However, Nvidia actually made the decision in 2019 to bring this image rendering technique to their older GPUs so it’ll be compatible with Pascal and Turing, including the GTX series and the 1060.

You can expect a drop in performance, although it’s not clear yet just how much of a reduction in quality this will be. Also, keep in mind certain games are more demanding than others, therefore the frame rates of the GTX 1060 will greatly vary.

AMD has manufactured the RX 570 4GB with GDDR5 VRAM and a 256-bit memory interface. This might limit you in the future as it starts to struggle at 1440p with the highest texture settings, and as 4k becomes more prevalent you’ll need a higher-end graphics card to keep up with this.

Nvidia has been slightly more generous when it comes to the GTX 1060 as this has a larger capacity of 6GB, therefore it has more room for image data storage. It connects to the system through a 192-bit memory interface.

The GTX 1060 also has faster running memory at 2002 MHz, compared to the RX 570 which runs at 1,750 MHz. The 1060 is better equipped to handle high-frequency gaming, but ultimately most modern titles will require 8GB of memory or more, so both of these older, budget GPUs will struggle as games become more demanding.

It’s clear to see that the GTX 1060 is the better GPU on paper and it has the better specifications of the two, boasting a bigger memory, better FPS, and Nvidia’s Pascal architecture, although it’s certainly a noisier choice.

The RX 570 shouldn’t be discounted, however. This absolute workhorse of a GPU will do overtime to impress despite a small drop in speed and it isn’t far from the quality of performance you would expect from Nvidia’s GTX 1060, despite the latter’s position as a firm favorite amongst gaming enthusiasts.

You might even find it cheaper in certain places, which is a definite win for staunch AMD supporters. It’s the budget-friendly hero of the GPU world, so if you’re hoping to spend less on your GPU then the RX 570 is the graphics card for you.