Abstract:
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 is approaching its tenth anniversary since its launch in the summer of 2016. Internet memes surrounding the farewell to the "beloved 1060" began with gamers sharing the card's long service life and recalling the early days of personal computers and affordable gaming hardware.
GTX 1060 uses Pascal architecture. The 6GB version was initially priced at US$249, and the Founders Edition was priced at US$299. Its performance at the time was comparable to the previous generation flagship GTX 980. The later 3GB version not only reduced the video memory, but also reduced the number of CUDA cores from 1280 to 1152, but still used the model name GTX 1060.
This graphics card has been at the top of Valve's monthly Steam hardware survey for many years, and it was not surpassed by the GTX 1650 until 2022. Today, there are still players using the 6GB version, while admitting that an upgrade is imminent; there are also people who give the old card to their children to run "Robolos" and "Minecraft", or install it into a Linux experimental computer and continue to use it.
NVIDIA has announced in 2025 that the 580 series driver will be the last driver branch to provide Game Ready support for Maxwell, Pascal and Volta architectures, and security updates are promised to continue until October 2028.
Players' discussions also included 3dfx Voodoo2, Radeon All-in-Wonder equipped with a TV tuner, and the experience of manually modifying the startup configuration to run games in the DOS era. The GTX 1060, which is approaching its tenth anniversary, has thus become a node for players to review the changes in PC gaming hardware across generations.
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