The official Facebook page of NVIDIA Philippines has just confirmed the launch of the GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card for the local market.

According to NVIDIA’s press release, the GeForce GTX 1060 “delivers GTX 980 gaming performance at twice the energy efficiency.” NVIDIA also mentions that “across the top gaming titles, GTX 1060 is on average 15 percent faster and over 75 percent more power efficient than the closest competitive product at stock speeds.” Practically, this means that the GTX 1060 is on par, if not at the very least, slightly better than AMD’s Radeon RX 480, especially in the power efficiency specs.

As the budget entry for NVIDIA’s Pascal GPU architecture, which boasts record-breaking speed and power efficiency, the GTX 1060 features 1,280 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8Gbps and a boost clock of 1.7GHz, which can be overclocked to 2GHz for additional performance.

The GTX 1060 also supports the NVIDIA VRWorks platform, a software developer kit for virtual reality applications. NVIDIA Ansel technology is also integrated into the GTX 1060, allowing gamers to “explore, capture and share the artistry of gaming in ways never before possible.” Select games such as Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst and Witcher 3: Wild Hunt will be able to take advantage of this feature later this month, and more games in development will also be utilizing this proprietary technology.

At a competitive MSRP of $249 (around P12,000, but don’t forget to add a few more thousand to the Philippine SRP as usual), no doubt the GTX 1060 is a great value card for those looking to upgrade their PC gaming rigs. Based on the early benchmarks, GTX 970 users won’t be seeing much of an improvement moving up to the GTX 1060. Gamers with GTX 960 cards and below, however, will be gaining a lot of performance with the jump.

Local tech retailer PC Hub already has listings of the GTX 1060 on their Facebook page.