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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
189 Comments
View All Comments
Raniz - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Good review, though I must say that calling it a review of a $249 MSRP card when neither of the cards actually reviewed has an MSRP of $249 is a bit weird.I think you should have at least one card that is actually priced at $249 in the review, even if the FE is supposed to be exactly the same as those cards.
Nephelai - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Never been a tin foil hat guy but I'm starting to believe nvidia is holding first borns on threat of including a GTX 980 TI or two in SLI in any review.MarkieGcolor - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Yes! The GPU market is wackedSushisamurai - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
I feel sorry for you Ryan. So much work out put in and yet there's still so many people that blast you and Anandtech as if you owe the vendors and readers "timely" reviews. Don't let it get to you guys - they'll still come and read just like I do, as your site offers something many don't.Anyways, back on topic, I feel the MRSP is a little BS In Canada, Newegg sells the products at ~$280 USD (1 SKU), with the Asus Strix @~$330 (other SKU's listed >$330). For $100 over the 480 in CAD (only reference boards available ATM) that 1060's perf/$ is too intense, almost priced at the next bracket (1070's only $50-$100 off the 1060 price, might as well get the 1070 then). Neat to see the 1060 #'s in action, too bad there's a limit on overvolting and TDP for over clocking.
IKeelU - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
This review really needed some Doom vulkan to paint a more accurate picture of how these cards will perform in the future. I understand that Anandtech will expand on this review later on, but many of us are buying cards now (well, trying to at least).Simplex - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
I'd love to see more Vulkan based, but how realistic is it? How many games were announced to use Vulkan?How popular was Vulkan's predecessor (OpenGL) in the past?
Tech-Curious - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Problem is that the nVidia optimizations for Doom Vulkan haven't even been attempted yet. You can find a bunch of reviews that show the 480 blowing the 1060 out of the water in Doom Vulkan, but we really don't know how representative those results are.Those results are very encouraging for the 480 though, just in general performance terms.
Tech-Curious - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
Correction, the quote I had in mind references async compute specifically. From Bethesda's Doom Vulkan FAQ:"Does DOOM support asynchronous compute when running on the Vulkan API?
Asynchronous compute is a feature that provides additional performance gains on top of the baseline id Tech 6 Vulkan feature set.
Currently asynchronous compute is only supported on AMD GPUs and requires DOOM Vulkan supported drivers to run. We are working with NVIDIA to enable asynchronous compute in Vulkan on NVIDIA GPUs. We hope to have an update soon."
https://community.bethesda.net/thread/54585?tstart...
eddman - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Thanks for the review. I hope to see an HTPC review down the line, with a short 1060 or the upcoming 1050 (/Ti?).jackbutler - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
Could we please see a review of the new HEVC/H265 encoding performance of GTX1060 vs RX480?