The GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition & ASUS Strix GTX 1060 Review
by Ryan Smith on August 5, 2016 2:00 PM ESTRise of the Tomb Raider
Starting things off in our benchmark suite is the built-in benchmark for Rise of the Tomb Raider, the latest iteration in the long-running action-adventure gaming series. One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 4 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.
NVIDIA promised GTX 980-like performance for the GTX 1060, and this is more or less where they’ve landed under Tomb Raider. The otherwise stock clocked GTX 1060FE underperforms GTX 980 by only a frame or two, delivering about 97% of the performance, while the factory overclocked ASUS card makes up the difference and takes the lead. Or to compare things to the next tier up, GTX 1060 is delivering about 72% of GTX 1070’s performance for about 65% of the price.
Meanwhile the performance gains over the past generation GTX x60 cards are remarkable. Whereas GTX 960 struggled to break out of the 30s on framerate, GTX 1060 just cracks 80fps. This is 215% of GTX 960’s performance, more than doubling its predecessor. Some of this I don’t doubt comes down to memory – our GTX 960 is the more common 2GB variety – but it also goes to show once again how 2GB cards are now VRAM limited under modern games. And the performance gains are even greater if we go back to 2013’s GTX 760 or 2012’s GTX 660. GTX 960’s one disappointment was that it didn’t make as much progress over GTX 760 as everyone would like, but GTX 1060 more than makes up for this.
As for the AMD competition, things shape up about as you’d expect. In our look at RX 480 we found that it delivered GTX 970-like performance, while GTX 1060 is slated to deliver GTX 980-like performance. As a result we see the GTX 1060 lead by around 15% at both resolutions for Tomb Raider.
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anandreader106 - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
First thought: Still no Doom benchmarks being factored in?Ryan,
You are my favorite GPU reviewer. Period. However I do think I need clarity on your Final Words.
It's my opinion that DirectX 11 performance is "good enough" from Nvidia and AMD thus far in this new generation. So I'm left wondering, why aren't you going more in-depth with DirectX 12 and Vulcan titles/performance? Wouldn't that give us the best indication of what to expect going forward?
cknobman - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
The best indication you will get is that when reviewing Nvidia cards none of these things will be addressed?Why, because Nvidia is not doing so hot at them and it would not make their cards look better than AMD's.
Look at the other 1060 benchmarks and comparisons and you will see that:
A. Nvidia is behind on dx12 and the 480 => 1060
B. @1080p the 1060 is overkill and a $200 480 4gb (or even a $180 470) is all you need
C. Because of Nvidia's "founders edition" price gouge model most 3rd parties are trying to get away with charging more than $250. Reality is most 1060's are >= $270 which makes the AMD 480 the better buy.
StrangerGuy - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
It's funny the AMD fanboys always harp about the evil $300 1060 and never mentions how their favorite $200 480 is essentially vaporware and 8GB versions price gouged to death.Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
"It's my opinion that DirectX 11 performance is "good enough" from Nvidia and AMD thus far in this new generation. So I'm left wondering, why aren't you going more in-depth with DirectX 12 and Vulcan titles/performance? Wouldn't that give us the best indication of what to expect going forward?"The benchmark suite only gets updated periodically. It's a lot of effort to design and validate a testing sequence, and then run (and possibly re-run) 30 some-odd cards through it. So adding games has the net effect of slowing things down even further.
At this point we're updating the testbed to Broadwell next month, at which point we'll refresh the games list as necessary.
Though I will note that there's a reason we run so many (9) games: one game is too small of a sample size. Right now Doom is the only Vulkan game on the market,* so while it's a very interesting first look at Vulkan, it's not something that's going to be representative of Vulkan as a whole.
* We'll ignore DOTA 2 since it's not meaningfully GPU limited on these fast cards
CHADBOGA - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Doom is one of those few games out there that will inspire people to go one way or the other and should be included in your benchmark suite.Scali - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Aside from that, the Vulkan implementation in DOOM is not yet complete.As you can read in the DOOM FAQ, they use AMD shader intrinsics extensions, but no equivalent for nVidia. Likewise, on AMD hardware, async compute is enabled, on nVidia it is not yet. The FAQ says they're still working on optimizing the code with nVidia.
While it may be interesting to benchmark DOOM's Vulkan implementation to get an idea of where we currently stand, I don't think it is mature enough at this point to say anything about performance in Vulkan games in general, or how AMD and nVidia stack up, since you're comparing apples to oranges at this point.
rhysiam - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
I too am curious as to why the whole DX11 vs 12 comparison wasn't even raised. DX12 does not appear once in the conclusion page. The 1060 is the better DX11 card, no question. It's early days for DX12, but what we're seeing so far is enough to suggest things may well be quite different. The three DX12 titles in the review (Hitman, RoTR & AoS) are the three strongest games for the 480 by far. Add Doom via Vulkan into the mix and you have 4 NextGen API titles that put the 480 at or above 1060 performance. Of course we can't make hard and fast recommendations based on a few titles like this, but surely it's worth mentioning at least, if not exploring in detail?This might be a minor point except for the fact that you dismiss the 4GB 480 based on speculation/extrapolation that its VRAM won't be enough to keep it competitive future demanding titles. Surely those demanding titles will increasingly be (or at least offer) DX12 though? So if you're advocating a 1060 over the 480 4GB based on longevity and future performance, the DX12 question has to be raised doesn't it?
rj030485 - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Think Ryan needs to work on his math. He says the 1060 is 17% faster than the 480 in GTA V when the difference more like 30%.Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Oh geeze. This is what happens when you read the wrong column in a spreadsheet. Thanks!onemoar@gmail.com - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
I don't know why anands witcher 3 scores are so lowI am pushing 80FPS in places with everything turned up to ultra and post effects on with no hairworks