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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Wall Street - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Yeah, it is amazing how many times the text "$249" appears in this review of a $299 card and a $314 card. Ryan is fully feeding into nVidia's price anchoring. I think that if the price chart shows $249 for the GTX 1060, then it should also show $299, because the $249 cards are nowhere to be found and explicitly not the ones he looked at.Ryan Smith - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
The entire Founders Edition things makes reviewing a bit more complicated. But since it's purely a stock card from a performance perspective, it's a very reasonable proxy for the $249 cards. No GTX 1070 is going to under perform the 1060FE, because that's the minimum specs allowed to begin with.Wall Street - Saturday, August 6, 2016 - link
With Turbo Boost, I am not 100% sure that the single fan Zotac or EVGA 1060s which are the actual $249 cards will maintain the same clocks as the founders edition will.Samus - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
What's depressing (for me anyway) is this card consistently outperforms my 970 in the games I play...and my 970 cost substantially more just a year ago. It's pretty unusual for a mainstream card to overtake an enthusiast card in one generation.Death666Angel - Sunday, August 7, 2016 - link
Well, this was a full node shrink (no half node) and a much more advanced process (FinFET), so unfortunately, it was very likely. However, you've had a good year of great performance out of your 970, so not too much to complain about there. :DSamus - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
True. The 970 will hold tight until I eventually graduate from 1920x1200 to 2560x1600.spbx - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
after anand left thing weren't the same :(BrokenCrayons - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
So true! There was a huge decline in the use of capital letters and punctuation by readers in the comments section.Cygni - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
Yeah, the influx of the same terrible negativity posters from other websites has really been annoying lately.Morawka - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
That's what popularity and the reddit crowd will bring.