It has been nearly ten years since the launch of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 in the summer of 2016. Spurred by online memes bidding farewell to the "beloved 1060," players have begun sharing stories of the graphics card's long service life and reminiscing about the early days of personal computers and affordable gaming hardware.
The GTX 1060 is built on the Pascal architecture. The 6GB version launched at $249, with the Founders Edition priced at $299, offering performance comparable to the previous generation's flagship, the GTX 980. The later-released 3GB version not only reduced VRAM but also cut the number of CUDA cores from 1,280 to 1,152, while retaining the GTX 1060 model name.
This graphics card topped Valve's monthly Steam Hardware Survey for years until it was surpassed by the GTX 1650 in 2022. Today, some players still use the 6GB version while acknowledging that an upgrade is long overdue; others pass their old cards down to their children for playing Roblox and Minecraft, or install them in Linux experimentation PCs to keep them in use.
NVIDIA announced in 2025 that the 580 series drivers would be the last branch to provide Game Ready support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures, with security updates promised to continue until October 2028.
Player discussions also touch on the 3dfx Voodoo2, the Radeon All-in-Wonder with its TV tuner, and the experience of manually tweaking boot configurations to run games in the DOS era. The GTX 1060, nearing its tenth anniversary, has thus become a milestone for players looking back at the evolution of PC gaming hardware across multiple generations.