AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20 vs NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile vs AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56

AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20

The AMD Radeon Pro Vega 20 is a dedicated graphics card for laptops. It was introduced as an option to the 2018 MacBook Pro. The graphics card offers 20 CUs (1,280 shaders) and 4 GB HBM2 memory. The performance should be on a level with the Radeon RX Vega M GL (also 1,280 shaders) and therefore between a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile

The mobile Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 is a graphics card for high end laptops. It is based on the Pascal architecture and manufactured in 16 nm FinFET at TSMC. The GPU is using the smaller GP106 chip. Compared to the desktop version of the GTX 1060, the laptop version offers the same amount of shaders but slightly lower clock rates. The TDP is slightly less than the old GTX 970M (predecessor).

For thin and light laptops Nvidia offer a Max-Q called version of the GTX 1060 with lower TDP and also significantly lower performance. Sadly this variant im sold with the same GTX 1060 name, making it hard to judge the performance.

The performance of the mobile GTX 1060 is a few percent below a reference GTX 1060 desktop card. In our benchmark so far (no max-Q version) the mobile GTX 1060 was somewhere between -1 and -16% slower than a desktop variant. A comprehensive review of the dekstop GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition with 6 GB GDDR5 can be found here. Therefore, the card is most suited for Full HD or WQHD gaming in high to maximum details (see benchmarks below).

The GP106 chip is produced in 16nm FinFET at TSMC and offers a range of new features, like DisplayPort 1.4 (ready), HDMI 2.0b, HDR, Simultaneous Multi-Projection (SMP) and improved H.265 video de- and encoding (PlayReady 3.0). A list of improvements and features can be found in our article on the Pascal architecture.

The power consumption is specified with a TGP of 80 Watt and therefore slightly below the old GTX 970M. Since summer 2017 a low power variant (Max-Q) is available for thin and light laptops with reduced performance and a lower TGP of 60 - 70 Watt.

AMD Radeon Pro Vega 56

The Radeon Pro Vega 56 uses the same chip as the Radeon RX Vega 56 but with reduced clock speeds for the chip and HBM memory. It is used in the first generation of the Apple iMac Pro All-in-One PC.