The GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition & ASUS Strix GTX 1060 Review
by Ryan Smith on August 5, 2016 2:00 PM ESTAshes of the Singularity
Sorely missing from our benchmark suite for quite some time have been RTSes, which don’t enjoy quite the popularity they once did. As a result Ashes holds a special place in our hearts, and that’s before we talk about the technical aspects. Based on developer Oxide Games’ Nitrous Engine, Ashes has been designed from the ground up for low-level APIs like DirectX 12. As a result of all of the games in our benchmark suite, this is the game making the best use of DirectX 12’s various features, from asynchronous compute to multi-threaded work submission and high batch counts. What we see can’t be extrapolated to all DirectX 12 games, but it gives us a very interesting look at what we might expect in the future.
Ashes is a game that in our GTX 1080 review we found AMD does rather well in, with their last generation cards still challenging GTX 1070 at times. So I was surprised to see GTX 1060 and RX 480 so close here. At 1440p GTX 1060 trails by just a couple of percent, and at 1080p it’s a dead heat. Given that of all of the games in our current benchmark suite this is the game that AMD seems to do the best on, it’s notable that GTX 1060 can keep up with AMD’s card even when it’s on the backfoot. Given that NVIDIA is charging a slight price premium for the GTX 1060, it’s helpful for NVIDIA that the card never falters against its slightly cheaper competitor. That said there is also the spoiler effect of the cheaper 4GB RX 480, but that’s a slightly more complex matter for the conclusion of this article.
Meanwhile on a generational basis, GTX 1060 continues to deliver GTX 980-like performance. Or against the GTX 960, we’re looking at a considerable 74% performance improvement. GTX 1060 is even fast enough to do better than 30fps at 1440p with the Extreme settings, which for an RTS is perfectly playable. However GTX 1070 still has a significant lead over the GTX 1060 here.
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Notmyusualid - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
Seems amazingly mis-priced.The lowest I see a GTX1060 for, on Amazon.co.uk is 260 GBP (delivered). That is $340 USD.
The pound didn't fall that much.
silverblue - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
True, but what taxes go on top of that $250? As a Brit myself, that's out of genuine curiosity.thesavvymage - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Taxes vary by location, in my state, Washington, sales tax is almost 10% (which i think might be the highest sales tax) so it'd land around 275. UK prices include taxes, US dont, so the price premium isnt as much as you'd initially thinkmdw9604 - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
Why aren't the 1080 performance numbers included in the Charts? This thing cost about half as much, would expect about half the performance. But b/c they were not included, can't cant really come to that conclusion.Ryan Smith - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
While the charts can handle more results, we're trying to keep things readable. If you want a 1080 comparison, Bench would be perfect for this.mdw9604 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Thanks for taking the time to reply, will check it out. Would think it would be useful to include the newest high-end nvida graphics cards for perspective.medi03 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Thanks for the review, Ryan.I've noticed difference in power consumption results between your and other sites (let's take TPU for example).
You are testing total power consumption, which, given PSU's 80%-ish efficiency, should give bigger differences between cards, than if testing power consumption of GPU alone (pcie/connectors).
On your site, ref 480 consumes 37 watt more than 1060.
Ref 1070 consumes 6 watt more than 480.
On TPU site (PCIe, "average gaming"):
1) 480 consumes 47 watt more, which, taking 80% PSU efficiency in account, is 58.7 watt more
2) 1070 consumes a bit less than 480
(review is for an AIB, but I'm comparing Ref vs FE numbers)
https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Palit/GeForce_...
Any thought about why that might be? Can chips really vary that much? Is power consumption that different between different games?
Ryan Smith - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
"Can chips really vary that much?"Yes, especially since these cards are at times TDP limited .Move the temperature up or down by 5F and you'll get slightly different results with blowers, for example. That said...
"Is power consumption that different between different games?"
Absolutely. There can be a massive difference in the CPU load from the simulation, and on the GPU side there's the balance between texturing/shading/ROPing. We can't test all games, so with Crysis 3 we try to pick a game that offers a reasonable middle case. But if someone else uses a different game they can get very different results.
Greeba77 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Great review as always, however I was hoping this would also take in the recent benchmarks that have come out comparing the 1060 to the RX480 using Vulkan on Doom, in which I gather the Nvida card completely tanked. And of course whether this should have any bearing on any decision to buy anyway... if the regular performance is as clear cut as it looks then it seems the 1060 is a pretty good mid range upgrade choice for me (I have an R9 270X at the moment so it's a few generations old and this or an RX480 will smash it.)beck2050 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Great card for the money when prices settle down. Early adopters always pay more for popular tech.